Social Bookmarking and Connectivism

This past summer I was lucky enough to have attended the Wild Turkey Feltmakers Shibori and Nuno-felting retreat in the Finger Lakes region of New York. The photo I’m using to illustrate connections this week is a Shibori dyed piece of silk that a participant in the workshop made. While it looks like what we in the West call tie-dye, it is as opposite from that as it is similar. Shibori is a Japanese technique which starts with an intricate and even meditative folding and ironing of a large piece of fabric. Once the fabric is folded and ironed into a small geometric shape there are many ways the fabric is prepared again before the dye is applied. It can be sewn, tied, bound to an object, or items can be attached that will prevent the fabric from receiving dye such as chopsticks, clips, etc. The fabric is then dipped into dye or the dye is painted directly onto the fabric and when the fabric is unbound the results are breathtaking. Patterns, patterns, patterns, my how we do love to seek out and find patterns.

It wasn’t hard to find the patterns and connections this week between our Pedagogy II class and Web II. Both instructors led us down the quantum physics road, Will with social bookmarking and Elaine with Connectivism. What I’d like to think about for this entry is the dual nature of reality that we perceive as order and chaos. This notion embodied to me in the glorious work of Jackson Pollock. Drips on canvas of an outrageous alcoholic you say? No, not quite. Computers have looked closely at them and determined that they are fractals, the order in the chaos. The Internet has an order inherent in the network structure with each node connecting to others. But the chaos lies in its dynamic nature. Who really knows where anything is. It is never the same river twice.

But all of the folks who make up the Internet are indeed self-organizing, just like sytems like to do, on sites such as del.icio.us and furl. They are creating folksonomies all by themselves. Del.icio.us is a place where you can organize the sites you want to bookmark as dynamic links (you will see the updated version of the website when you return). I don’t know how I got along without this site before, it keeps me personally organized. At Furl, you can actually save a static page of the website as it is right now. I don’t see weakness in these folksonomies, because I have a general trust of the populace and a general distrust of those who say they are the keepers of knowledge. There is just no way that anyone can keep pace with the exponential growth of knowledge and I see the Internet as a way to democratize knowledge. Will did an experiment in Web II class to prove that the theory of the Wisdom of the Masses does indeed work. He brought a jar of beans and asked us each to try to guesstimate how many beans were in the jar. Answers were tallied and were all over the map. End results: the person who guessed the closest was off by 34 beans, the average of the group was only off by 17! This is the thesis of James Surowiecki in his book "The Wisdom of Crowds", but what he reminds us it that there needs to be several things in place for the theory to work. What he has found is that there needs to be diversity of opinion, individual independence, decentralization, and a method to aggregate results. It seems as though those things exist currently on the Internet. Where did I hear the phrase The Answer is in the room…?

This leads me to George Siemens learning theory for the Digital Age – Connectivism. So in this dynamic network structure of the digital world how do we navigate learning? Through all of the connections: people to people, data to data, people to data, networks to networks in glorious dynamic chaotic harmony. The learning may be outside ourselves, and when we make the connection to that outside learning our own knowledge grows. The connection points in a network are called nodes. One definition I found said each node is a portal or link to other networks or spaces of knowledge as it’s termed in learning theory. Spaces of knowledge that are different from the brick and mortar buildings filled with the keepers of the knowledge? Amazing, exciting, omnipresent, and face it, not going away. Here are the principles of Connectivism as outlined by Siemens:

*Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions
*Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources
*Learning may reside in [technology]
*Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
*Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning
*Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill
*Accurate up-to-date knowledge is the intent of all connectivist learning activities
*Decision-making is a learning process and what is right today may change tomorrow

Ultimately the role of the teacher in higher education will shift dramatically as this new theory takes hold, because content is no longer privileged. The empty pail waiting to be filled with information metaphor is long past. The students looking up at the lecturing professor are not impressed and want more than to regurgitate tired old tidbits that were valued and important in decades past. On the Experience Designer Network Brian Alger’s weblog states: This perspective is opposed to traditional curriculum design in which knowledge, skills and attitudes seem to be frozen communication. Connectivism does not seem to be trapped by the curricular technology. So the teacher’s role needs to be to show students how to become discerning, think critically, and ask the right questions. Siemens states: Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decision made yesterday is also critical.

Reality is dependent on the Observer or the "I." Truly we each individually create our own order out of the chaos around us. In "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", Zukav states: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle demonstrates that we cannot observe a phenomenon without changing it. The physical properties which we observe in the external world are enmeshed in our own perceptions not only psychologically, but ontologically as well. When we become active participants in this “distributed cognition” in the digital world we constantly change it and are changed by it.