The talk was divided into two parts – roughly 20 minutes of which featured my presentation, and a following 10 minutes of open discussion.  I opted not to record the discussion component because of two key reasons: a) the microphone wouldn’t have picked up everyone and b) I hadn’t sought approval to record people before hand.

Slides and Audio

Slides (PDF): Slides for UNFED presentation on CCK08

Audio (MP3): Recording from CCK08 Presentation for UNFED

These files are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and can also be downloaded from Archive.org:

http://www.archive.org/details/Cck08IntroductionAndDistributedTechnicalFrameworks

Certificate in Interdisciplinary Studies: Emerging Technologies for Learning (ETL)

One of the questions that came up during the session is how to enroll formally in CCK09.  The course is part of a wider certificate in Interdisciplinary Studies: Emerging Technologies for Learning, being offered out of the University of Manitoba.

According to their website, the tuition cost is approximately C$420/course (that’s Canadian Dollars), and “most materials are available online and software used is open source.”

More information on the formal enrollment and the certificate is available here:

http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/con_ed/mpcp/cis/etl.shtml

NOTE: Due to the fine detail of the screenshots, this presentation is best viewed full screen.

These slides were prepared as a visual aid for a presentation for the UNSW Network of Faculty Educational Developers on 5 August 2009.

The primary foci of the presentation are the technical frameworks and environments used during Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2008, the distributed nature of the resulting systems, and corresponding learning networks that developed.

The expectation and hope is the presentation will inspire wider discussion on the opportunities and challenges of distributed learning frameworks such as Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) and how they might be incorporated into courses – and importantly, how courses might be changed to enable learning networks to form.

For more information on UNFED, please see the following post on the UNSW TELT blog:

http://blogs.unsw.edu.au/telt/blog/2009/04/02/unfed-unsw-network-of-faculty-educational-developers/

Among other reasons, this course is all about learning through connections and learning networks. It would make sense then to open the discussion to the network as well and begin to work together.

Blog
As I’ve mentioned before, I am a highly reflective learner. I prefer to think at length on paper before I engage in discussion and like to be able to watch patterns and recurring themes unfold over time. Blogs are particularly well suited to my learning style, and as such I expect this blog will continue to see the bulk of my attention for the course.

Discussion is nonetheless a critical component to learning as well, as it enables people to gain exposure to different perspectives, interpretations, information and experiences. It can also serve to help filter, interpret, and find meaning in at times complex situations or contexts.

Blog comments are one way this can be accomplished, and in CCK08 this proved to be a very valuable and stimulating source of learning. However blog comments are perhaps not as useful for large groups because they rely on a post to stimulate the discussion and resulting conversations can become spread across many disparate and distributed spaces. So having additional ways to connect, share, discuss and debate is important.

Twitter
For short discussions and sharing of information Twitter has proven quite a valuable tool. Use of the hashtag #CCK09 also enables aggregation, syndication and location of related updates at a later time.

However the 140 character limit and the fact Twitter ties updates to people and not threads poses a constraint that eventually calls for another solution.

Moodle, Facebook
There are a variety of options for more long-form, threaded discussions and these are just two of them.

Personally I don’t tend to like engaging in mass group discussions much – and am unlikely to use the course Moodle installation – so my preference is for a small group.

Given many people I know from CCK08 are on Facebook and interacting with one another already it would seem to make sense that we create a group there. This would enable us to share links and resources and engage in discussion using the native tool.

Ultimately you need people and consensus to establish a group discussion space so I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this matter.

Google Reader
Given the distributed nature of the course there will be many, many different spaces where interaction is occurring, or information is being shared. So an RSS reader is critical.

My reader of choice is Google Reader, biut there are a myriad of comparable services that do the same thing.

I’ll be using my feed reader to subscribe to blogs, Twitter search results, video uploads and perhaps wiki updates.

Google Alerts
Feed Readers are fantastic for keeping up with the sites you know about, but in order to uncover unknown sources of information and discussion you need another approach.

Google Alerts is my preference there, and it’s a simple, yet fantastic tool. Basically you create a search criteria and a notification schedule and Google will send you an email outlining the sites that match the criteria at the frequency you specified in the alert.

Personally I create an alert that notifies me of all content created in the last 24 hours that has been tagged “CCK09.” I then go through the list and subscribe to any interesting sources in my feed reader.

YouTube
Video was not used extensively during CCK08, but it is nontheless an effective medium to convey information. Perhaps the most effective use of video that I saw during the last course was Wendy Drexler’s adaptation of the format made famous by the Common Craft show.

Podcasts & Vodcasts
I travel a whole lot during the week – 2.5 hours each direction to and from work – and have an enormous amount of time on my hands that can be spent reading, writing or studying. Gaining access to downloadable materials for me would be tremendously valuable, so I’m hoping these sorts of formats will be made available.

Skype, Elluminate, SecondLife
One of the challenging aspects of engaging in an online course of this scale and scope is the fact you never really get to meet with other students in person en masse. So it’s useful to find alternative means of bridging the geography.

Text-based mediums like IM and to a lesser degree Twitter do help establish a sense of social connectivity to a degree, but a tremendous sense of humanity is lost in the absence of voice and sight.

In this sense tools that support voice and especially camera-based conversations can add a great deal of depth to interactivity and enhance the connections that develop.

The issue in my case though, at least in CCK08, was with time zone differences. With many participants living in North America and Europe, many of the meetings were held late at night or early in the morning.

The facilitators of the course, George Siemens and Stephen Downes, really bent over backwards to hold multiple sessions – frequently late at night for them – which was fantastic. However many of the student-organised sessions fell in off-times.

Ultimately it’s just the nature of online communication, which I fully accept. Fortunately there are alternative opportunities available via asynchronous communication. However this does point to the importance of releasing videos that capture the human presence – if only to provide introductions to ourselves.

In order to do the experience justice, though, I think I need to spend some time reflecting on the experiences and lessons learned during CCK08.  However just broaching that train of thought immediately introduces a myriad of thoughts and feelings, which almost certainly won’t fit into a single blog post.  So I anticipate a theme will emerge in the coming weeks as I unpack my thoughts on the matter.

My CCK08 experience

The long and the short of it is that CCK08 was an incredible experience.  The subject matter was fascinating; the cohort size and diversity was staggering; the nature, scope and scale of the distributed frameworks was incredible; and the sheer volume of information and discussion was titanic.  My appreciation for and perspective of online learning and open education was inextricably altered, and my thirst for additional knowledge on the matter unquenchable.  By the end of the session I had more questions and research topics than I’d started with, and importantly I’d developed relationships and friendships with some incredible people.

Likewise my understanding of online interaction was constantly questioned and my behaviour in the face of disagreement, debate and conflict challenged (sometimes to disappointing epiphanies).  In many, many regards, the course inspired personal growth and development, lead to the acknowledgment of my short-comings and character defects – as well as strengths – and ultimately represented perhaps the greatest intellectual learning curve I’ve traveled since leaving uni 10 years ago – perhaps even including uni.

In light of all this my motives for wanting to take the course again are clear.  Yet much has changed in the last year.  I’m not the same person I was in 2008, and have learned and experienced much since then.  So it would be a mistake to assume the same experiences will emerge in 2009.

Something old, something new

With few exceptions the cohort of students will be brand new.  This as much as anything is the essence of the subject – connective knowledge.  Even if we covered exactly the same curricula in the same order, were assigned the same assessment tasks, readings and projects – the experience would not be the same.  Connectivism says that knowledge is distributed across as network and is comprised of all the unique experiences, understandings, and perspectives of the nodes within it; and that learning is the act of establishing connections with nodes in the network, and then gradually forming a web of nodes that encompasses both depth and diversity.  In turn, these networks help to aggregate information, and having done so interpret and synthesise it.

The facilitators may be the same, the knowledge within the network and the outcomes that emerge from it will be very different.  Chaos theory, Networked Individualism, Rhizomatic Knowledge, abundance of information, lack of symbolic meaning in language – each contributes to the organic, unpredictably developing and emerging nature of knowledge and information.  If we learn from each other, and our experiences are unique, then we will never run out of new ground to cover.

Be Strategic

In 2008 I had minimal understanding of many of the learning theories and schools of thought that we covered.  As such the learning curve was extraordinary.  When every term and topic raised is one you’ve never heard before – let alone understand – you find yourself doing a whole lot of reading, and feel as though you’re constantly playing catch-up.  Adding to this the very unique nature of CCK08 as a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), with 2,200 enrolled students at start of session, and the fact each individual was encouraged to develop their own distributed learning spaces, you literally could not stay on top of all the discussion that were taking place – yet try I did.

After a while I learned it was critical to be strategic in your approach to the course.  That it was impossible to absorb, synthesise and comprehend everything – and that trying led not only to cognitive overload, but frustration as well.

You don’t go into a public library and try to read every book on the shelves; you pick a subject, thread, or niche to focus your attention on.  The same premise goes for a course with several thousand unique voices.  Besides, with distributed online spaces being what they are, the information will remain there long after the course is over.  There’s plenty of time to explore and digest.

Next post: Personal aims and objectives for CCK09

[Image credit: "Openness and Collaboration" by psd (CC - by)]

When I observe people who live in an open paradigm, where learning, teaching, sharing, collaborating, and communicating are done publicly, and made freely available to others to rip, mix and burn, I see far more than simply the act of doing so, or the resulting output of tangible objects – I see a philosophy for living and being. A philosophy that is not based on self-satisfaction, personal gain, or what’s in it for you; but in the fundamental belief that it is the best way of working – best for ourselves, for our peers, and for society.

Here’s the paradox of it all: The more we give away; the more we share; the more we think of others, and what we can contribute to The Common Good – the more we receive in return. This has been my experience.

Open is Free

My experience also says that openness is far more about “free as in freedom,” than “free as in beer.” Free as in beer certainly lowers the investment requirents to engage, but ultimately the value I’ve derived from openness – and indeed opening – lay in the freedom it has afforded me to meet, interact, and contribute.

I believe that the economic concept of The Tragedy of the Commons does not apply in an open paradigm. Some economists believe that “public goods” (that is, goods and services for which no fee or cost is incurred during consumption or use, and no barriers to access exist) are inevitably exploited. They say people use or consume a public good as much as they can as quickly as they can, with little or no thought of others, in the belief that the good or service exists in only finite quantities that will inevitably disappear.

I believe The Tragedy of the Commons does not apply to openness because openness is not a public good. It can’t be purchased, sold or stolen. It’s an ethos and philosophical belief that is embodied.

Openness works because “open” is an action verb, like “leap,” “explore,” or “embrace.” Openness means participating, engaging, and connecting. The more open the environment or system, the greater the opportunities.

My experience has been that the value of openness lay less in the use of the artifacts of openness (though there is certainly value here) – such as open educational resources, open courseware or open source software – and more through engaging in the ongoing processes that lead to their creation, interpretation, negotiation of meaning, re-evaluation and ultimately sharing.

Open is Messy

Openness is unplanned, messy and unpredictable; yet these are also some of its strongest assets. In messiness and unpredictability lay diversity and experiences or knowledge that have not yet been realised, explored, or considered. As such openness is inherently experiential; you never know what you’re going to discover, and it’s only through engaging, interpreting and negotiating that the implications and opportunities become clear.

Openness is unbounded and ongoing. It’s not something that you plan or implement; it’s something that you do, something that you are, or something that you choose to become.

Open is good.

The inspirations for this post

Jenny Mackness raised the topic of truthful blogging, suggesting:

“…the fact is that not telling the truth, often means simply not speaking at all – holding your own counsel. And in blogging this means not writing anything.”

Elsewhere on the web Bronwyn Stuckey echoed the same sentiments in a comment left on a post by George Siemens, saying:

“…When I blog or tweet or comment on FB, while it is part of a stream of activity, I am still choosing to project aspects of my day or thinking and leave behind others. Impressions are gained from that are no more the whole me – just what I elect to expose…”

Both of the above comments lead me to thinking…

New Media, Networks, Connections

For a while now I’ve been going on about how new media provides an opportunity for people to develop their own personal spaces and networks in a manner that best accommodates their needs and ways of working and being. I’ve talked about the notion of digital identity; the idea that the footprints we leave during our travels across the new media landscape reveal who we are as individuals and that this enables us to develop connections and networks with others through the growth of shared experiences and common understandings. These networks in turn empower us to more effectively filter and interpret the enormous and diverse flow of information that exists in the world – both online and offline – and ultimately facilitate the processes involved in sense making where we come to understand concepts that previously eluded us.

Friends and Strangers

The ideas of open dialogue and sharing of information become really significant here, because the more holistic a picture we reveal of ourselves, the more effectively we can engage with others, and others with us. Consider for example the difference between trying to hold a conversation with a complete stranger versus a well-trusted friend.

With a stranger there is no common language, no shared experiences, relatively minimal familiarity with ideas and concepts, and minimal (if any) sense of trust and connection. Conversations tend to be relatively superficial, frequently revolving around very general “safe” topics (e.g. “small talk”) which enable discussion to occur, while revealing little information about ourselves. As interaction continues, the presence of common themes, shared experiences, understandings or belief systems may begin to yield a sense of trust, which can lead to more in-depth discussion and sharing of more personal information and exploration of more substantial topics. This reinforces and facilitates the growing connection and enables the ties to strengthen.

Therefore it would seem that connections can only develop in the presence of information. In the absence of information, growth of ties is restricted.

Private conversations on a crowded train

The issue with online interaction is that conversations with trusted peers frequently occur in the same space as anonymous individuals. Much like having a private conversation in a crowded train, we can become influenced by our surroundings, and vicinity to strangers. This can serve to inspire more selective sharing, where we not only withhold certain information but may also seek to control the manner in which both the information and ourselves are perceived by others.

Personal reflection

I had previously considered myself to be quite open in what I say and do on the Internet, as well as the information I share with others. However in considering all this I’ve been brought to realise this isn’t completely true. In fact there is a great deal of information I don’t share.

Some of this is withheld for reasons of safety and security (such as address, phone number, bank or credit card details); other bits of information I’ve realised I’ve withheld out of fear of what people will think. The latter is a fairly disappointing realisation really.

Sharing my thoughts about ideas, concepts and theories I’m quite comfortable doing – talking about myself and my life experiences is another matter completely.

[To be continued...]

I’d like to write more on this but have to get moving.  I’ll try to come back to it later.  In the meantime if you have thoughts or comments on it I’d love to hear them.

Identity Crisis

A few years back the blogosphere underwent a fairly significant identity crisis.  In a relatively short period of time several services emerged, including Friendfeed, that began to facilitate the discussions of groups of people regarding content that was located elsewhere.  Other sites went even farther, harnessing the aggregative power of RSS to reproduce whole posts, and effectively circumvent the original authors of the content.

Certain bloggers – especially those with a financial interest in their sites – were up in arms about the hostage-taking of their hits, and the fundamental fracturing of the discussions into a myriad locations across all corners of the web.  Lamentations of brands being undermined and devalued were common.  People pontificated that this was the end of blogging, and there was no longer a point to maintaining a blog since hits and comments were doomed to descend into mediocrity.

What this represented is an old-world view of the internet, where conversations revolved around, and were restricted to, the content and platforms that originally inspired them and a distinct social hierarchy existed that placed content and author over reader.

Platform agnosticism

Then Robert Scoble made the statement “I go where the conversations are,” and it immediately put things into perspective for me.  The old-world view focussed on content; the new-world view on conversation.

Discussions are platform agnostic.  They occur anywhere and everywhere; online and offline,  irrespective of the original source or location.  They are fluid and dynamic; subject to the opinions, beliefs and needs of the participants, and ultimately highly fractured.

Thus, to a fair degree, platform-centric perspectives perpetuate a content-centric view of communication in which artefacts of conversation and reflection are more important than the conversations and reflections themselves.

Certainly, this isn’t to suggest we all abandon our blogs and go home.  Rather, it’s to emphasise the notion that the fundamental nature of any medium – be it a video, blog, whiteboard or even scroll of parchment – is to facilitate a dialogue between one person and another and establish continuity of communication.  The conversations are the important part – they transcend technology – the medium is just a vehicle.

Therefore to a certain degree, my call yesterday for a blogcamp was a platform-centric view of communication.  Blogs facilitate a great deal, but they aren’t the end-all and be-all for communication.

Networks

On the topic of networks, at this stage the cynic might say: “If discussions are platform agnostic, highly fractured, duplicated, replicated, and personalised, how can we expect any network structures to develop?  What’s to prevent the web from descending into amoral narcissistic anarchy?”

My argument here relies on several points:

First of all, George Siemens argues that there are several criteria characteristic of every learning theory.  In particular these include:

• We have a need to externalise;
• We have a need for frameworks or structures for sense-making;
• We have a need to socialise and negotiate around knowledge;

These three points suggest that people naturally turn to others to help make sense of the world and their place in it; to come to terms and make connections with complex topics and concepts, and effectively gain a better appreciation for who we are as individuals and a society, and where we’re going.

Furthermore, particularly in the context of the internet, there are additional concepts to contend with, namely the complexification of information driven by a climate of abundance.

These two concepts emerge from an age when a combination of free online services coupled with the increasing ubiquity of web-access is such that virtually anyone can make their thoughts known on any subject they wish, and present it in any format, using virtually any medium.  This has served to exponentially increase and diversify the aggregate knowledge pool to the point where an individual is absolutely incapable of filtering all relevant sources of information themselves.  Whatever we choose to call them, we need networks to learn.

Not if, but how

The issue then is not a matter of “if” growth of networks is beneficial, but rather how to effectively facilitate and nurture their development.  Thus we once again return to the notion of network literacy.

There is little doubt that the landscape of new media, and the Internet more generally, is vast and complex.  As such the prospect of navigating the many connections and nodes, pathways and backchannels can be a daunting one for new users.

Moreover, given the natural habit of conversation and communication to transcend technology, and the inherently individualistic and personalised nature of the new media landscape, we would do well to avoid platform-centric approaches that inadvertently place content over conversation.

Communication is universal, and in a sense, timeless – platforms are not.

Furthermore, economic rules of scarcity still hold true.  Organisations and institutions do not wield infinite resources to support an infinite combination of personalised learning environments.  So it would seem that the most effective means of empowering students and staff to cultivate their own healthy networks, is to help them realise the process by which they do it.

Inevitably networks will build upon new media and therefore require the development and acquisition of technical skills, but inevitably they will also expand outside of technology as well.  The importance for holistic network development is recognition of its wider and more fundamental purpose of connecting people, conversations and concepts, rather than platforms and content.

And yet from the perspective of the bulk of the uni community, the notion of blogs and their affordances is still largely enigmatic, or worst still unknown completely. So amidst the current planning for a launch of a centrally-sponsored blog pilot project, I (along with others) have realised there is a tremendous need for increased awareness of the organic, social nature of the new media ecosystem, what this entails in practice, and in particular, considerations of and for community and network-development.

The bigger picture

From a technical standpoint blogs are very simple tools. Their true value lay in their capacity to fuel and empower the wider holistic, social, educational, individual, communal, intellectual, participatory, creative and other elements. However in the early days of blogging this reality isn’t necessarily clear to new bloggers. Neither is there an immediate sense of network or community in the blogging process. Both need time and energy to cultivate and grow.

While some bloggers will see an immediate value and opportunity in use of blogs, and therefore actively engage with the new media ecosystem, others will greatly benefit from the experiences of others.  Others still will effectively seek an answer to the question eternally asked of educational technology: “What’s in it for me?”

A brief word on New Media Literacies

While I can’t quote specific sources on this, I’ve seen the notion of new media literacies poo-poo’ed a fair amount recently, and disparaged as a Web 2.0 catch-phrase that’s thrown about without consideration – and yet the idea behind it is of critical importance.

Higher education in particular maintains strong ties with traditional hierarchical structures, and an emphasis on delivery and retention of information, as opposed to devolved or distributed power to and leadership by the learners. As a result, students arriving at university, and the staff who instruct them, continue to operate in an old paradigm where instructor is accustomed to being the centre of a clearly delineated classroom, acting as a gateway to what is learned, how it is learned, and the information that is covered; while students remain on the periphery, relegated to a role of consumption, memorisation and retention of information. Likewise, the walls of the institution are high, with activities and individuals that that fall outside of the auspices of the university considered irrelevant to what occurs within it.

In a very real sense universities are still walled gardens, with socio-educational roles woven into the fabric of the academy to the extent they’re no longer questioned by its participants. The prospect of breaking this mold, and venturing outside the walled garden into a landscape that is inherently personalised, diverse, unbounded and democratic requires a fundamental awareness initially of what has changed, and in the longer term an ongoing exploration of the possibilities that emerge from a participatory culture that recognises the academy as a part of, not apart from, the world outside.

Blogcamps

All of these factors have led me and others to realise there is a core need for wider activities that seek to foster the the growth of networks, development of new media literacies, and sharing of creative ideas. The importance here is, unlike the implementation of blog platforms, the efforts to cultivate more holistic elements needs to come from the culture itself. It can’t be forced or coerced from the outside, or the top down; it needs to grow from the ground up. Importantly the discussion also needs to extend beyond the traditional walls of the academy to connect local bloggers with the diverse, wider community.

So the thought occurred to me this morning that a blogcamp (a barcamp for bloggers) would be the ideal first step. Quoting liberally from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcamp):

Structure and participatory process

BarCamps are organized and evangelized largely through the web, harnessing what might be called a Web 2.0 communications toolkit. Anyone can initiate a BarCamp, using the BarCamp wiki.

The procedural framework consists of sessions proposed and scheduled each day by attendees, mostly on-site, typically using white boards or paper taped to the wall. This is a form of the open-space approach and has been dubbed, with another play on words, The Open Grid approach.

While loosely structured, there are rules at BarCamp. All attendees are encouraged to present or facilitate a session. Everyone is also asked to share information and experiences of the event, both live and after the fact, via public web channels including (but not limited to) blogging, photo sharing, social bookmarking, wiki-ing, and IRC. This open encouragement to share everything about the event is in deliberate contrast to the “off the record by default” and “no recordings” rules at many private invite-only participant driven conference

In keeping with the notion of what Mat Wall-Smith calls a “flat ontology,” blogcamps would provide a forum where anyone and everyone are encouraged to participate and can play an active role in the evolution of a nurturing, networked culture. This would include students and staff from all educational levels, as well as people from outside the educational sector.

In my view, in order to be effective and nurturing, blogcamps should adhere to a few key principles:

Blogcamp Principles:

• Open participation – all are encouraged to contribute and discuss
• Open content – freedom to mix, rip, burn, and share
• Flat heirarchy – leave your title, position and role at the door
• Community governed – led by group consensus
• Inclusive – recognition of accessibility, equity, diversity, and equal opportunity

Challenges

These are just my preliminary thoughts on all this.  In the longer more will be required to cultivate the participatory culture and flat ontology than barcamps alone.  They are merely what I perceive to be the first step.

However successful a grass roots approach may prove for drawing together a diverse community of bloggers and creative thinkers, ultimately no lasting change can occur within the academy until the affordances and realities of a participatory culture are internalised in some form. This, I suspect will be the greatest challenge, as there will be stakeholders with a vested interested in maintaining existing structures.

To be honest I don’t know the best course of action to take just yet. I’m hoping some discussion will emerge around this idea. Ultimately it may prove that we are moving a mountain one spoonful at a time. The importance is to just keep shovelling.

Late last week, through a wild series of connections I learned through Jim Groom at University Mary Washington in Virginia that there is an instance of WordPress Multi-User (WPMU) being run locally out of EMPA at UNSW, called New South Blogs. After initially wallowing in a sense of unimportance about not being aware of this fact beforehand I’ve begun to realise the significance of all this.

It is my hope that the seeds of our preliminary discussions represent an opportunity to nurture and grow a participatory culture that spans faculties and indeed breeches the walls of the academy itself.

PARTICIPATIVE PEDAGOGY

In his essay “Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies,” Howard Rheingold writes:

“…we must develop a participative pedagogy, assisted by digital media and networked publics, that focuses on catalyzing, inspiring, nourishing, facilitating, and guiding literacies essential to individual and collective life in the 21st century. “

The strength of new media technologies lay in their capacity to connect and empower. Blogs, vlogs, wikis, microblogging, podcasts, VOIP/webconferencing/IM, streaming video, virtual worlds, and social networks all offer different affordances that help build a framework for communication and engagement, and yet these technologies are ultimately just vehicles with which and through which we can navigate the wider landscape of a participatory ecosystem. The key significance lay with the growth and evolution of the culture itself, and the opportunities and collective power that emerge from it.

CULTURE

As has been shown by examples both online and offline, participatory culture has the capacity to produce extraordinary results given sufficient attention and care.

The open source community is one such example. Based largely on the efforts of a passionate army of volunteer users, developers, writers of support documentation, and contributors to a myriad discussion forums, the FOSS community has developed and supported countless GNU/Linux’s distributions, GNOME, Apache, Drupal, WordPress, Mozilla Firefox and many other applications. The community focus is largely upon technical elements certainly, and yet it is doubtful that these outcomes would have been possible in the absence of a shared, participatory culture. At its core a “Free as in freedom and Free as in beer” idealism is the glue that holds the disparate activities together.

Therefore in my view Culture is the essential component; the technology is a facilitating mechanism or vehicle to expedite and facilitate communication and collaboration.

Indeed, as Rheingold continues, of core importance is the degree and depth of participation:

“Because the unique power of the new media regime is precisely its participatory potential, the number of people who participate in using it during its formative years, and the skill with which they attempt to take advantage of this potential, is particularly salient.”

DIVERSITY AND NETWORKED LEARNING

When looking at participatory culture from within the context of learning, additional elements and considerations come into play. In particular the concepts of networked learning (Downes 2007) and connectivism (Siemens, 2005b). Here a network is comprised of nodes and connections (Siemens 2005a), and the relative value of a network is dependant on several key characteristics including diversity, autonomy, openness, and connectedness (or interactivity) (Downes, 2007):

Downes (2007) continues:

“…networks that are more diverse – in which each individual has a different set of connections, for example – produce a greater maximal value than networks that are not. Compare a community of people where people only read each other. You can read ten people, say, of a fifty person community, and hear pretty quickly what every person is thinking. But reading an eleventh will produce almost no value at all; you will just be getting the same information you were already getting. Compare this to the value of a connection from outside the community. Now you are reading things nobody else has thought about; you learn new things, and your comments have more value to the community as a whole. “

The capacity of digital and new media to span socio-geographics regions, cultures, even languages and time extends individuals’ reach well beyond the confines of the academy, where cohorts of students focus largely on like subject matter via formalised curricula. Integration of opportunities for informal learning, communication and exposure to new nodes and connections can lead to far greater network diversity, and therefore enhanced maximal value.

The existence of a participatory culture, therefore, does not imply everyone agrees with each other, but rather that they “see themselves as creators as well as consumers of culture.” (Rheingold, 2008)

CULTIVATING CULTURE

The critical task looking forward lay in the cultivation of holistic sociological elements, rather than a focus on technical ones. As I commented at NewSouthBlogs.org:

“I find in interacting within this culture that gaining a grasp of the technology has been the easy part; developing an appreciation of the dynamic, multifaceted nature of the interrelationships in the network – and figuring out how best to engage with it – has been far more complex.

Likewise, determining what my place and my role is in the network is has required far more consideration. The short answer, I think, is your role is whatever you decide it to be (and it will grow, mature and evolve), but I think the real mental hurdle to overcome in the early days is that it’s very much a participatory culture in which to a degree we gain only as much as we give.

So in terms of exposing people to the opportunities in this sort of engagement, I think that’s the challenge. I also think the shift in cultures takes time to realise – and an awareness that learning and working with new media involves moving from a culture of largely knowledge delivery, and consumption of information, to one of active participation and a clear sense of ownership in our personal direction and ongoing motivation.

Personally I’m still coming to terms of the implications of this; so someone only just discovering the landscape may not have even made that connection yet. It would seem that’s an area of critical importance to focus on. I think once people develop a recognition of the significance of the experience and the opportunities therein, the vested interest in learning to use the technologies is a given. They become a vehicle to participation, rather than an end unto themselves.”

The prospect of establishing an empowering new media landscape – both with respect to learning and more generally – depends upon the cultivation of a vibrant culture, and therefore a holistic view in which the relationships between people, the dynamic, evolving nature of their interrelationships, personal aspirations, goals and beliefs are the key; as is a recognition of the importance of openness and communication in which both introspection and reflection can occur in tandem to discussion, and the notion that we can reach out while looking inwards.

REFERENCES

• Downes, Stephen (2007) “The Personal Network Effect.” Half an Hour, 4 November 2007. Accessed 28 January from http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2007/11/personal-network-effect.html
• Rheingold, Howard (2008). “Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies”. FreeSouls.cc. Accessed on 28 January 2009 from http://freesouls.cc/essays/03-howard-rheingold-participative-pedagogy-for-a-literacy-of-literacies.html
• Siemens, George (2005a). “Connectivism: learning as Network-Creation.” eLearnspace, 10 August 2005. Accessed 28 January 2009 from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/networks.htm
• Siemens, George (2005b). “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age.” eLearnspace, 12 December 2004. Accessed 28 January 2009 from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

“I read an article in a daily paper…about slow blogging. The article said that slow blogging had been a very popular idea, but that the person who had originally raised the whole idea of slow blogging now no longer blogged, presumably (according to the article) because people got fed up of waiting for the next blog post. This is an interesting dilemma – don’t you think? On the one hand we need time to be reflective, or simply to spend time away from the computer and on the other, if we don’t post on a fairly regular basis then no-one will read our posts anyhow!”

I’ve seen this train of thought expressed before but haven’t ever jumped into a discussion on the matter, but I think it’s an important one to consider – especially in the realm of educational blogging – so I responded with a fairly long comment.

In the interests of inspiring more widespread discussion on the matter I’m including the bulk of my comment below, but I’d encourage you to comment on Jenny’s post since she get’s credit for starting the thread.  Alternatively, be sure to send us both a trackback if you write about this so we can read your thoughts.

…In my view the core readers will stay with a blog no matter how long the period between posts. When I find a blogger I identify with – or better still, connect with – I’m happy to wait for the next post, so long as there is a next post.

I think this is particularly true in edu-blogging, since a core and critical aspect of the dialogue is to ensure the content is as accurate and well-considered as possible. Sometimes building conceptual connections takes time, and I think we owe it to ourselves as learners to leave as much time as is necessary to maximise the learning experiences.

In terms of Connectivism I find too that bloggers can connect with one another through other means than just blogging – Twitter, forums, YouTube, commenting, and others – and these can do a great deal to maintain dialogue and interaction when not posting.

In fact I think it’s critical to diversify the nature of ways we maintain connections with others, because I think this can lead to more in-depth, quality connections and learning opportunities. In my case my blog is a critical component to my connections, but it’s not the only way I learn. YouTube, the blogs of others, news articles, face to face chats, Twitter, whitepapers and journals, etc – all contribute to my learning experiences.

This is why it’s so important, I think, that we look past the tools themselves and to recognise where they fit in our own personal learning networks or personal learning environments. The tools and tech help us do a lot, certainly, but ultimately they’re facilitating mechanisms. In the case of my blog, it is just a vehicle to a wider purpose – in this case reflective writing, discussion, documentation, research and experimentation. So posts come as often as they need to.

I think that’s a sign of a good blog too in a way – the content is kept topical, relevant, and as in-depth as it needs to be to convey a point or concept at that moment.