CCK09 It’s time for a first round-up of what’s going on for me in the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Course. So here we go for a number of thoughts, some directly inspired by the course discussions and materials, others indirectly related. I’ll update this during the coming weeks – we’re only half-way!
- First I’d like to point out my personal perspective and starting point. As a financial journalist and a blogger about virtual worlds, my hypothesis is that we live in an environment of accelerating technological innovation. These innovations contribute to the economic and financial instability. Francis Heylighen of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, explains how increasing efficiency can lead to a decrease in control in his paper Complexity and Information Overload in Society. Just think about how advances in media and communications technology makes it possible for financial markets to react instantaneously and worldwide on news and rumors, setting in motion the feedback-mechanisms which ultimately lead to an unpredictability which makes economists more like meteorologists or seismologists: they can explain nicely what happened afterwards or as it happens, but don’t count too much on them for forecasting.
- One of the lessons of the current crisis is that it is very dangerous to have banks which are too big to fail, or too interconnected to fail. For certain governments such institutions may also be “too big to save”, and even if the government and the central bank have the means to intervene, the burden for society is huge and the effects on management (bonus culture which even continues after the rescue operations) are problematic to say the least. Maybe it would be better to have smaller institutions, which could also be managed more effectively and which would be nimbler to react on rapid changes in the environment. Maybe all this is also true for other industries, like the car industry or my own industry, newspapers, not to mention education!
- Talking about smaller entities: IBM mentions a future of one billion one person enterprises. Others point out that in California people stay only a few years with the same company, and the same trend is being reserved in numerous other states and countries. This means that even if employees formally speaking don’t have their own enterprise, they consider themselves to be more like a company, joining a team for certain projects, leaving the team when the projects are done or when they develop a passion for another project. Lifelong employment is becoming the exception.
- In CCK09 we discussed “groups” and “networks”. There was quite some discussion about the definitions of these words. However, what seems essential, is this distinction between on the one hand sports teams, companies and other groups which have some well-defined goal, where people are supposed to follow a common directions, to speak in one voice, to follow the leader(s) , on the other hand more diverse sets of connections, where everyone is doing basically her or his own thing, collaborating with others, but shifting positions in function of their own desires and passions, where diversity is normal.
- Networks however are not always good while more group-like organizations would be always inferior. We often need to be part of a team, trying to achieve some great results together. Networks can have some nasty effects as well, especially scale-free networks. Power laws lead to huge concentrations of connections (think financial markets, blogs…) which are not always justified from an intellectual or ethical point of view. One should realize some network effects will be very beneficial in terms of individual freedom, other effects can lead to extreme inequality. There are ways to do something about this, whether by re-introducing friction elements in order to reduce the scale-free negative effects and/or by consciously enabling subgroup structures.
- Going back to my first points about the financial crisis and the economy, there is some fascinating work being done using the notion of networks in the study of human civilizations. David Ronfeldt sees an evolution from kinship-based clans and tribes (the extended family), over hierarchical institutions (army, state, church) to a market-driven society (banks, trading) to societies where networks are dominant (activist groups, civil society, one could add open source movement etc).
- In this course there is a very interesting “macro” vision, like the above mentioned theorizing about the place of networks in history and in the evolution of technology and of the economy. There is some great stuff about network structures (power laws, scale-free structures or not, different constellations of the nodes of a network etc – let’s call this the theoretical groundwork regarding networks. Finally there is the very practical issue: where do we stand as learners and educators (and aren’t we all learners and educators) in those networks? We are part of more group-like structures (companies, teams…) and of wider networks (participating in online media) and of virtual communities and communities of practice which can be more group-like or more open network like. How do we organize ourselves in the various positions we have to manage simultaneously?
- Enters the personal learning environment (PLE). How good do we feel about a learning management system which presupposes that we know what students need to know in advance of their arrival, that we can control their learning, that students have similar knowledge on the basis of age/grade/program level have a similar knowledge base and finally that we always need coherence and structure in the learning process? Let’s look at how we are increasingly using wikis, forums, social networks, virtual environments, microblogging, video, collaborative mindmaps, blogs organizing our own networked learning. George Siemens’ TEKL-model describes in a rather elegant way how our learning becomes technologically externalized – the model can be considered as a description of what is already happening but also as a kind of desired project outcome.
- I’m aware of the fact I did not mention virtual worlds a lot. For me virtual environments are an integral part of my personal learning environment and they help us to overcome certain problems of scale-free networks and of the tension between open networks and groups.
How does my personal trajectory in the remainder of this course will look like? I’m not very sure about this – I want to be open for serendipity after all! I want to further explore networks and complexity on a more macro and theoretical level, but also I’d like to develop some ideas about personal learning environments, in a very concrete way – how technologically externalized are we already, what are right now the best tools for my own practice and how will those tools and their eventual integration develop.
Looking forward to new discoveries!
Roland Legrand