The Library
Last week I did something for the first time ever in the six years I’ve worked at UNSW: borrow something from the library.  The reason I hadn’t seen a need to visit the library up until that point is not due to the depth or diversity of its collection or expertise of its staff, but rather in the currency of its catalogue relative to my field.
This was driven home to me when our friendly library liaison Caroline came to visit nine months ago.  In the interests of helping provide …

Jeffrey Keefer said to me today: “You seem to have a large and wide network yourself. How do you foster that?”
The short answer to this is: “I actively seek out my network contacts and go where they go” or as Robert Scoble has said before: “I go where the conversations are.”
The longer explanation, as you might expect, is more involved that that.
Background
I’ve heard a couple of CCK08 students state that they had implemented Connectivism in practice long before they even knew what it was, or that it had a formal …

An interesting thought occurred to me while reading Jeffrey Keefer’s latest post at Silence and Voice (“The AIM of Social Media & Web 2.0“) that I’d like to explore here.
According to Barry Wellman’s “Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism” the whole notion of interrelationships, networks, and the role and place of the individual has been steadily morphing from the traditional neighborhood-based networks to one of “networked individualism.”
Wellman argues that
“…communities have changed from densely-knit “Little Boxes” (densely-knit, linking people door-to-door) to “Glocalized” networks (sparsely- knit but with clusters, linking households both …

As part of the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course, each student is asked to maintain and update a concept map depicting key thoughts or emerging ideas in visual form. I’m still trying to get my head around the whole concept, so I suspect a bit of a learning curve lay ahead in the best way to approach them.
Almost certainly changes and corrections are required and many more iterations lay ahead, but I’d like to throw this out for suggestions and comments. For a large view of the map …

Perusing some of the discussion threads and blog posts on the CCK08 course I’m taking tonight I was met with a stark realisation that I’ve left a crucial element out of the description of my criteria for a personal learning network as well as the people in it:  respect for others.
I made an attempt to look at some of the criticisms being leveled against the suggestion that Connectivism is a Learning Theory – and indeed the whole notion of Connectivism itself – and I am appalled by some of the …