Friday, September 26, 2008

CCK08 Forest, trees, paths and a bit of clarity

Today's session at UStream.tv brought along wonderful gifts. Thanks guys!

I saw a bit of clarity. I understood that one of the things that was confusing me was that I was not clear about which was Stephen's view and which was George's. Certainly the gray hair in George's avatar got me thinking that I had also confused their identities!!! As mentioned in the live session, I was walking through paths of confusion. The second one was the "distribution" issue.

I think I got the point, I may be wrong. While knowledge resides in the connections or forest, learning resides on the individuals or trees. Hence, knowledge is distributed across the networks, knowledge emerges from those connections, while learning is the capacity to build those connections and use them for our own purposes.

In this picture I show what I found:



The conversation was abundant, I felt it lighter and I could engage with it. It was about time :-)
Nancy White wrote, in her particularly rich descriptive manner, the way most of us feel in this non directive course. Her comment gave way to a description of intelligence. Intelligence is being understood as the ability or potential to comprehend, achieve, understand, function and absorb huge amounts of information. David Vidal came up with with the question: what is first, the egg or the hen?

That in turn lead us to... What is value? This point will be reviewed later on in the course but for now Stephen mentioned two aspects that define the value of something or someone:
1.- Goodness. Is it helpful?
2.- Measurement. Cost or number of units.

This other picture shows a bit of today's conversation

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello Maru,

Great schema... But I would change a couple of things... As far as I can understand, Downes' point of view is based on the explanation of neural networks, but applied to Social networks... In the step from one to another I think that he forgets the individuals...

George, in the other hand, starts directly in social networks, and explain them BECAUSE OF individuals... I think...

What do you think?

Maru del Campo said...

Thanks for you reply and phrase. . .
You made my day!

I agree with you. I see the same points you mention, they are kind of taken for granted in the picture, I did not know how to highlight them better. I avoided a long descriptive paragraph.

A closer look to the picture reveals that George's position is in blue while Stephen's is in green. The bottom line, the networks names, are the roots. Both part from a different position, as you mention.

Now, if we assume that all three networks form a circle, that they influence one another... what both authors are talking about is the whole circle because you cannot tear it appart.

And yes, while Stephen somewhat neglects the individual George focuses on the individuals. In their conversation both regard the social network from a different perspective.

It would be interesting to have an author positioned at the conceptual root, wouldn't it?

Sarah Stewart said...

Thank you very much for the analogy of the trees and forest - it's another step in my understanding of connectivism.

Maru del Campo said...

Hi Sarah!
Thanks for your visit, I am glad to know that the analogy was somewhat helpful.
From you blog I see that you have a lot of experience in this kind of courses, it also took me three weeks to sort myself out in this one.
See you around.
Love: Maru