Doh! I wrote this two days ago and forgot to click publish! n00b!
It’s the first week of classes for the Connectivism and Connected Knowledge course and I am already lapsing behind. As a Massively Open Online Course, maybe I cna get lost in the crowd of 2000 gazillion students.
Would you believe a dog ate my homework?
Despite my success at gaming the school system on high school and college (meant- learning how to take standardized tests well), I’ve become a sloppy lazy learner in my adult years. I have a lot of trouble with structured courses because… everything I have learned in my last 16 years on the ed tech field has been through what my teachers are going to call Connectivism- I learned what I needed, when I needed, from networked sources.
I did miss the first emails, overlooking I had to sign up to get them. I do like the version of resources Stephen has created with his tools, The Daily. There’s probably going to be too many ways to connect in the connectivism course. I see the giant list of discussion sin Moodle and think… do I hear water running outside? Is it dinner? So I am not going to try and draw some diagrams of key points, and to be honest, I am skimming the readings.
To be honest, the whole “is it a theory or not?” discussion is a bit of a yawner. Does it matter if we define it? Why are people so doggedly tied to a theory? Is one theory fit all? I kind of see useful bits across the spectrum. But the bickering back and forth, the battle to quote the most obscure academic reference, is, well for me… uninteresting.
I care more about what we do with all this.
At the same time, I have lived, worked, breathed in this connected space for as long as I have been in the field, and even a bit before that. I fully grok that the ways I learned, a lot of rote memorization of facts, is quite Victorian indeed. It was so important to know the capitals of 50 states (quick! What is the capital of North Dakota?), yet we are questioning whether it is more important to “know” that (which to me is imprinted in te recall area of my mind… Pierre, yes I remembered that I did not google it) or to “know how to get” that.
It’s a trivial example.
And yet, I am more interested in knowing or thinking about… how may times were captial cities placed somewhere unlikely between two rivals? I “know” (or think I do) this was the case in Arizona (Phoenix did not exist, but both Prescott and Tucson vied to be capitals) and Australia (Canberra was plunked down halway from Melbourne to Sydney).
And there is the interesting part to chew on. I have to acknowledge i work on a base of many things I have stuffed into my memory; ity does not always come from the cloud. So it cannot be all connectivism all the time. There is some foundation the ability to connect rides on.
So I don;t know where this all goes. I am doubtful of my own resilience to stay with a fixed pace course when there are so many networked things I have to dabble in. I’m already time challenged with leaving Wednesday night to stay on Phoenix, fly to San Francisco Thursday for meetings Friday, and then jump to China on Sunday.
Yes, the dog ate my homework this week and next.
Good dog.
Bismark
I agree with 100% of what you’ve said. I just don’t have it in me. We are surrounded by the artifacts of the debate every day. I’ve no desire to explore it in a structured arena. I’ll dabble in the messages here and there and watch from the fringes, but I just don’t seem to be engaging. It’s kind of like the pub at NV and trying to follow the sports discussion. Just nod your head and smile.
I signed up with all good intentions, yet we’re about to hit week two and I still haven’t finished the pre-course readings.
This statement of yours resonated well with me – “I have a lot of trouble with structured courses because… everything I have learned in my last 16 years on the ed tech field has been through what my teachers are going to call Connectivism- I learned what I needed, when I needed, from networked sources.”
Still it’s a great experiment that I’m happy to be part of. I think I’ll just dip in and out as I choose to meet my needs and reflect my interest and mood at any given point.