Interesting stuff, as always, from George Siemens and Konrad Glogowski. George’s discussion of meaning making merits a post all its own. Konrad’s blog today also inspires a few thoughts on my end. I hope he would agree, or at least find them useful or provocative extensions of his thinking:
Yes: we should teach connection and pattern recognition.
Content knowledge is crucial. Patterns are patterns of something(s), after all. It’s interesting and helpful to do figure/ground reversal tricks with the pattern and its constituent elements to stimulate new thoughts, but neither pattern nor constituent element should be privileged in any theory of education. It’s pattern and elements, process and product, teacher and student, lecture and discussion, etc. Otherwise, we can’t do figure/ground reversal tricks, and we risk not knowing anything.
We need to teach students how to make connections. We also need to teach them about other connectors. Great minds, in short. “Nor is there singing school / But studying monuments of its own magnificence,” writes Yeats. Sounds awfully arrogant, but it’s true: if you want to learn how to make connections, get very very close to someone who’s an ace at it. So much of the connecting and pattern recognition lies in tacit knowledge, subtle moves, unexpected yet rational decisions, irrational but not wholly random directions, oblique strategies a la Brian Eno, that students need the rich context of proximity to great connectors to get the full boost.
Related idea: people are nodes. Not discourse, not “culture,” not “society.” People. People are nodes. How can I connect? How can I be a connector? How can I be a connection? How can I put myself in a context where the chances of being or doing all those things goes up? Strategies for connection preparation. Fishing in well-stocked streams.
The idea of connection is itself a node, and another name for it is metaphor. How is a raven like a writing desk? How is a tortilla chip like a perfect, healthy strawberry cobbler cookie?
Way leads on to way. Viva la link.
Related
Speaking of nodes and connections, do you remember talking about the iPod shuffle in Milton seminar this spring? That classroom conversation got me thinking and when I got home, google gave me this blog post.
I thought it was fascinating, though I didn’t know what “Long Tail” meant, so I bookmarked the page and added the feed in case something else interesting popped up. I wandered off, caught in the net, and forgot about it. I’ve occasionally scanned the headlines in my RSS client, but nothing else caught my eye.
I woke at 5am this morning and unable to sleep, have been stumbling, barefoot, blair witch lost on the interweb since then. I wiki’d the Long Tail and was promptly fascinated, escaping from the labyrinth of links just a few minutes ago. On a whim, I checked back to the iPod post from January, and sure enough, it’s from the blog of Chris Anderson, who coined the phrase in 2004.
full circle.
In George’s post he said,
‘That brings me back full circle to the original definition I had of learning – actuated or actionable knoweldge…but with a greater focus on “what does it mean”.’
This reminds me of Bruner’s notion of the spiral curriculum. We may come back to where we started, but we’re at a higher level–we know more now or more deeply than when we began.
George continued: “For some reason that still leaves me dissatisfied.”
This doesn’t surprise me: even since grad school, I’ve had a strong feeling that the more I learn, the less I know.
Powerful idea–connectivism. It’s actually starting to make sense to me. For some time, I’ve felt a powerful sense of being bigger than myself through my connections with professional friends and colleagues.
Originally, I thought it was sort of vicarious: they’re really smart, so being around them makes me feel smart, even though I’m not. But ideas beget ideas, even in me.
Imagine if we could exploit this to empower our shyer or weaker students…
Absolutely right on in every respect. Bruner connection a thrill and everything else equally powerful. Viva la comment! Thanks.
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the more I read about connectivism the more I think, what a puddle of crap. Learning, knowledge and information are interchangable, and please don’t subject the ideas to peer review because it takes too long. good golly miss molly…
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