Connectivism at work

My most recent entry became a node - it sparked some thoughts in the blogosphere and those, in turn, came back and led me to continue to think about connectivism. Gardner Campbell's ideas are worth noting:

We need to teach students how to make connections. We also need to teach them about other connectors. Great minds, in short ... if you want to learn how to make connections, get very very close to someone who’s an ace at it.

This reminds me of what Prensky calls "legacy content" - students need to learn about great minds and the ideas they produced and not just what's online. They also need good teachers, people who are experienced "connectors" - people who will help students discover that Copernicus, for example, connects to the geocentrism of Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy but also to the heliocentric view of the universe and to the notion of immanence, subjectivism, intellectual freedom, the Renaissance, and religion in general. Good teachers can lead students from a focus on heliocentrism and planetary mechanics towards a discovery of more interconnected nodes and help them realize that Copernicus had a profound impact on religion and philosophy. Students need to see how the nodes develop into a network and how the network moves us away from pure science and towards ideas that seemingly have very little to do with planetary mechanics. They need to realize that this kind of content ("great minds" or "great books") is not a set collection of facts. True knowledge begins when young people realize that Copernicus is not just a page in the encyclopedia but that he connects to other pages, to other people, other events, other nodes. Only then can they actively begin to connect these nodes, interact with them, and thus create their own network of correspondences. This is how they learn to create their own trajectories of understanding.

This is also how our students can become nodes themselves:

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.

I like the term "connection preparation." How can I prepare my students? I think I have to ensure that they are comfortable with expressive writing (for a good overview of how to accomplish this task, see this article by Joan Vinall-Cox). I think I also need to make sure that they are comfortable using tools that can help them navigate the networks around them and organize their personal knowledge. I also believe that they need to be able to interact with these networks and to contribute to them. Finally, they need the freedom to explore and connect, to co-construct, to learn through discovery. They need to know that the journey takes precedence over the final result.

Teaching Connectivism

Will Richardson's latest post about the changing nature of the teaching profession got me thinking about Connectivism. Will writes:

The Web and these technologies have transformed the way I learn, provided me with many teachers who push my thinking, given me the potential to direct my own education as it is. Why don't more educators make it a part of their own practice? [...] What we need to be is connectors who can teach our kids how to connect to information and to sources, how to use that information effectively, and how to manage and build upon the learning that comes with it. That's a much different role than "science teacher" or "math teacher." Now I'm not saying that subject matter expertise is irrelevant and that there aren't core concepts that discipline specific teachers shouldn't teach. But they should be taught it a much wider context, not in the fishbowl this is our traditional classroom.

There's no question that Will is right. We need to be "connectors," as he puts it, because if we fail in this task, our students will be overwhelmed by chaos. They won't know how to look for patterns and connections in that chaos. If we teach our students to function effectively within communities of practice, if we teach them how to look for patterns and make connections then they will begin to see the surrounding chaos as a teaching organism. They will see in it a living entity. They will begin to understand the principles of Connectivism.

In his essay on Connectivism, George Siemens says that "learning is a process of connecting" and that the ability to perceive and nurture connections between ideas and concepts is a crucial skill. And yet, as Will rightly points out, this is not something that the world of education has embraced.

I don't think that anytime in the near future I will be able to say that I teach Connectivism, but I know that I have made some progress. My personal knowledge is really a network of correspondences and connections. I learn by interacting with a huge network of individuals and learning objects (some are available online, some offline). I read and comment on a variety of what George Siemens calls "nodes"or "information sources." The inspiration for this entry, for example, came from a node I can refer to as "weblogg-ed.com." I am now connecting this node to my own thoughts and experiences. So, I began interacting with a network when I opened up my Bloglines account, found a node of particular interest, and am now building a connection. Learning is no longer an internal, solitary activity happening inside an individual learner - it is also a process of creating knowledge. This connection would not exist without the nodes created by Will Richardson and George Siemens. It would not exist without a personal network of nodes that I created with my Bloglines subscriptions. It cannot exist unless it is reified in this very entry where it becomes another node in an ever-growing network. My learning is therefore dependent on my ability to perceive some sort of connection or pattern in the available chaos. "The value of 'pattern recognition,'" to quote George Siemens again, "and connecting our own 'small worlds of knowledge' are apparent in the exponential impact provided to our personal learning."

How does all this affect my teaching methodology? My classroom has transformed itself from a place where knowledge was pre-packaged for students to a place where they are now given a responsibility of creating it, where they have to participate in existing networks (class blogosphere, for example), nurture their own (Furl or del.icio.us accounts, blogs), and look for connections. Their participation leads them to formulate their thoughts and ideas, to find connections between their own views and the nodes they find around them. Once a connection is made in the form of a blog entry for example, the students have created their own knowledge - they've made a contribution to their own understanding and the network itself. Once they start building, they become engaged and empowered; they understand the value of community (or a network) and their own place and role in it.

It is at that point that I become a teacher of Connectivism, engaged in the task of teaching my students to recognize and formulate connections and patterns. I make them aware of the transformative potential of participating in and learning from networks. It is their history or trajectory of participation that becomes the true goal of education.

Tools for Next Year (Part I)

Nancy McKeand's recent post has motivated me to start thinking about the tools I am going to use next year in my classes. I know that blogging will continue to form a significant part of the course. I will incorporate blogs "as key, task driven, elements" of my curriculum. I will once again use blogs to create a community of writers. This year, however, I want my students to engage in more research. This has led to some thoughts about the tools they can use to make their work sharable, visible, and interactive.

First of all, I would like to get students to use TagCloud to create a visual representation of student work (from both individual blogs and as a community). This would be a great introduction to tags and also a wonderful way to show students that writing can be "visible" in a fun, interactive way. I also want my class to use this application to see patterns and trends in their own writing (individual tagclouds) and in collective work produced by all of its members (community tagcloud). I'm hoping that this tool will emphasize the interconnectedness of their work and make it really "visible" to them. (Amazing things happened last year when we looked at some visualizations of writing: here and here).

I'm also thinking of using Furl or another social bookmarking application. What I like about Furl is that it would allow me to comment on individual bookmarks saved by my students and, of course, allow them to construct repositories of materials to be used in projects or their blogs. One of the strengths of this application (and social bookmarking in general) is that the collected information can be easily shared with one's peers. I want my students to use this tool to not just collect valuable resources but also categorize them and annotate them (using the comments field) before adding to the database. I want them to read/skim the electronic resources they find and then categorize and annotate them based on that first reading of the text. What I am hoping to see is Furl collections driven by genuine interest in a given topic and sharing of resources among students researching similar topics. (Shadows, which I discovered this morning, could also be interesting in getting students to write and exchange comments about online resources).

In short, I am interested in exploring students' TagClouds, Shadow Pages, or Furl databases as evidence of learning. They can all demonstrate individual engagement with the studied material while being firmly entrenched in and continuously expanded upon by a community of learners.

I still need to think long and hard about the place that these tools will occupy in my classroom. I know that they will have to be, much like blogging itself, driven by student interest. I don't think I am going to force my students to use these tools. When tools of this sort are embedded well pedagogically into the curriculum, students use them because using them seems natural.