I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nicholas Carr
Lego bricks invite to creating connections between separated entities.
This past week has given me lots of food for thought. The last week of lectures and seminars has included ethical dilemmas, text analysis, narrative analysis methods, hypertextual storytelling, efferent and aesthetic reading strategies, assessment practices along with inspiring, challenging and difficult discussions. A dilemma materializes during a week like this. A sense of meaningful learning, ideas emerging and connections made. However, the sneaking feeling of frustration lurks behind. How can I make sense of it all? How can I use this to improve my teaching? How am I able to pursue all the fascinating roads of essay topics? I might share the frustration of Nicholas Carr in his essay, but I think I see a sense in the chaotic, interrupted nature of the avalanche of information flows which are abundant both in an analogue and a digital form.
I am trying to find a connection, and slowly I think I am reaching new insights and new knowledge. I have lots of ideas for this blogpost, but I think I will focus on George Siemens’ theories of connectivism. Drawing upon past theories of behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism he presents an interesting theory for the digital age. In my opinion I find that even though we have all this technology available, we also have a nauseating array of possibilities to work together as individuals. Social media and networks are nothing without the people using it.
I realise that there are so many connections to be made between the various media and messages sent and received on both a connotational and denotational level. One of the most important realisations is that we act more as bridges than stand alone ramparts. With all our shortcomings and insufficiencies we need each other, and by helping, challenging, questioning, reasoning and interact together we are able to experience fulfillment and acquisition of new knowledge and skills.
Siemens lists significant trends in learning:
- Many learners will move into a variety of different, possible unrelated fields over the course of their lifetime.
- Technology is altering (rewriting) our brains.
- The organization and the individual are both learning organisms.
- Know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed).
From this I deduce the following insights:
- Learning happens all the time – both formally and informally.
- Learning is a human condition.
- Technology and especially social media and networks known as web 3.0. act as valuable tools for our learning.
Knowledge is no longer (has it ever been?) acquired linearly. Knowledge comes as a result of experience (objectivism), thinking (pragmatism) and reflection (interpretivism) - and the ability to synthesize and recognize connections and patterns is a valuable skill. (Siemens, p.2). In connectivism chaos plays an important role. Nigel Calder’s definition of chaos as ‘a cryptic form of order’ seems appropriate, but chaos needs learning strategies, didactical leadership and an ability to synthezise, deduce, cooperate as well as structering and organizing information flows. Barabasi states that “nodes always compete for connections because links represent survival in an interconnected world” (2002, p. 106 cited in Simens’ article), and the phrase pheromone trails, or digital pheromones (excellent podcast by Rodd Lucier exploring the idea) tantalizes me. The biological act of animal interaction in ant population transferred to the digital age, where we engage in multiple interactional transfers online free from geographical boundries is an uplifting one. What might appear as a meaningless utterance on Twitter might play a bigger role in another conversation and new insights might be found. We act as bridges for each other.
Ideally we can transfer the connectivity theories to the classroom. We tend to compartmentalize our knowledge in school in subjects, although we attempt to work cross-curricularly. However, new emerging technologies based upon semantic intelligence call for more of a universal transferral competence which needs to be part of a digital competence.
Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.
George Siemens
Actionable knowledge might be a useful term here to make sense of the chaos (sic). The learner needs to act and find what Ken Robinson calls The Element (a good read) – a place where the learner is able to use his/hers abilities to the fullest and be in a state of flow and thus make connections within networks of learning. Hopefully, I myself, am on the way to sort some ideas, and make some new and make a connection. Are you?
