George Siemens’s Connectivism. “We derive our competence,” writes Siemens, “from forming connections… Chaos is a new reality for knowledge workers… Unlike constructivism, which states that learners attempt to foster understanding by meaning-making tasks, chaos states that the meaning exists— the learner’s challenge is to recognize the patterns which appear to be hidden. Meaning-making and forming connections between specialized communities are important activities.”
So… pattern making. This has been the essence of my effort since mid August when I dove off the deep end and decided to learn by doing. Prior to that I had created a wiki and a couple of blogs, but I hadn’t attempted to use them as learning tools for myself. I’d read about personal learning environments and had an idea of what I thought “THEY” would be!! Please somebody… tell me… “What’s my personal learning environment? How do you do that? What are the rules? How’s this supposed to work?” Right.
Confound… there is no such thing as A personal learning environment… it is just that… it’s mine. Now, that really is just about the tools… but the environment is all around us. Right.
I started a blog thinking I would write down my thoughts and maybe hook into some other blogs and some other sites. I’d make it pretty and I’d pontificate with heartfelt zeal. Right.
I learned off the bat that I didn’t like the term blog. It doesn’t work for what this is. So, I refer to them as k-logs (short for knowledge logs and pronounced KAY-LOG — not klog as that conjures up other images!) Right.
What a difference an experience makes. John Connell’s comment and my investigation into how he found me, how he connected to me and how he pulled my blog infomrmation into his… it was fascinating (amazing in fact… a huge A HA moment for me) and all of a sudden the pieces started to come together. Right.
Knowledge is being generated everywhere… some of it is of very high quality (whether scholarly or not), some is scholarly and the quality varies tremendously. Not only are we now asked to analyze static web pages (a subject of information specialists such as librarians for the last two decades or so…) but now we are invited to evaluate (thank you Stephen Downes) a person or a group’s ongoing learning and accept it or decline it as it fits with our own understanding, knowledge and beliefs. I have found that this process is more intuitive than I thought. I am an educationed person with good critical thinking and analytic skills. I can smell out a marketing pitch and separate it from a novice learner from a scholar… I really don’t need someone to filter that for me. And, that is one of the points of the personal learning environment… I don’t need an intermediary. And, in fact, as a doctoral student I’m not supposed to need an intermediary… I should be able to evaluate and synthesize and otherwise assess content that I’m reading. Right.
But… herein, I believe, lies the very first challenge to the universal concept of the personal learning environment, and even e-learning 2.0 in general. It presumes that the learner has upper order skills. That is probably a viable assumption in young adults and older adults. It certainly can be fostered in if we begin to rethink the classroom in an open style it may be possible. But, I don’t think we can throw Bloom’s taxonomy out with the bathwater. Right.
Okay, so I start looking at Bloom’s taxonomy against what I’m experiencing as I try to order this chaos of experiences. Turns out, I think it’s a pretty good guide. I need to think about it some more, but there is something very powerful to this. Next step… disintermediation. Right.
Remember… meaning exists.
