Tag Archives: Connectivism

Balance and a river of information

Almost 2 years ago now, I had to seriously shift my attitude around online information. I was gullibly trying to read every tweet in my ’stream’ and diligently trying to keep my unread items on Google Reader at a handful. I saw these as pools of information and I wanted to hold on to the information that came into the pool. It was too much. The shift for me was seeing information as a river. Now, I’ll paddle along the stream, but when I get out, I don’t feel the need to pay attention to the stream of information that goes by. It has been liberating.

The key is finding balance rather than being inefficient as I tried to demonstrate in this 4 slide presentation I did for a Connectivism course:


That was the first assignment for the course and it helped me decide to drop out of the course as I tried to seek balance.

I think I’ve made a few points, but if I could make one more it would be that my life still lacks balance and I still spend too much time online… but 3 years ago I would have ‘wasted’ that same amount of time, or more, watching TV. In the wise words of the Comedy Network’s tag-line… to me my online life is ‘Time well wasted’.

via a comment I made on weblogg-ed.com – ‘The Choices We Make’

~ The idea behind a post I’ve written in my head about 50 times… some day I’ll really expand on this idea on my Pairadimes blog.

The original post for the slide presentation is here: Connectivism, Relationships and Balance. But it is in the comments that the ideas behind the presentation really came out. 

What should we do with tools to make them great? » Online Sapiens

What should we do with tools to make them great?

November 6, 2010 by emapey

David Truss (via @sabridv) suggests what we can do with tools to make them great

1. Give students choice
2. Give students a voice.
3. Give students an audience.
4. Give students a place to collaborate.
5. Give students a place to lead.
6. Give students a digital space to learn.

Compare this list to:

– Stephen Downes Connectivism Principles:

1- Autonomy
2- Diversity
3- Openness
4- Interactivity and Connectedness

and to

– Chickering and Gamson Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education

1. encourages contact between students and faculty,
2. develops reciprocity and cooperation among students,
3. encourages active learning,
4. gives prompt feedback,
5. emphasizes time on task,
6. communicates high expectations, and
7. respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

As George Siemens posted, It’s not about tools. It’s about change.

It’s the change underlying these tools that I’m trying to emphasize. Forget blogs…think open dialogue. Forget wikis…think collaboration. Forget podcasts…think democracy of voice. Forget RSS/aggregation…think personal networks. Forget any of the tools…and think instead of the fundamental restructuring of how knowledge is created, disseminated, shared, and validated.

 

Posted in Connectivism, Learning 2.0

via onlinesapiens.wordpress.com

Eduardo did a great job of putting together several ideas around the same theme such that the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts!

On my post David Warlick added, “Give the learners a sandbox.”
I like the idea of ‘Play’ and also that he changed ‘students’ to ‘the learners’.