As I sometimes find hard to locate the threads I will place an extract here and ponder about it during the week.
If you wish you can visit Stephen Downes original post.
"I have advanced a position in my own work proposing four major principles of association:
*resemblance - a.k.a. Hebbian associationism
*contiguity or proximity - a.k.a. salience
*feedback or back propagation
*balance, or entropy a.k.a. Boltzmann mechanisms
Conclusion
A lot of what I've tried to argue in this (admittedly long) post is that Connectivism is a non-intentional theory of learning and knowledge.
What this means is that, in connectivism, learning is not about content. It is not about entering a certain representational state with respect to the world.
Such an account makes the representational state - rather than our actual thoughts, perceptions and feelings - the arbiter of what it is to know, what it is to have learned.
But connectivist learning does not require representational states. It does not require on the part of the learner that they commit to a particular account of the external world.
It allows - indeed, encourages - the idea that people may have different, and individual, accounts of the external world.
Which means that what is negotiated is not some set of statements about the nature of that world - not representational states, not meanings - but mechanisms for communication, protocols for interaction (which may indeed be, and probably are, understood differently by each person engaged in communication)."
To add to this confusion I stumbled into Ken's blog, it did not clarify my ideas but I had a good laugh which I welcomed.
Will I someday be able to understand the riddles?
Time will tell.
2 comments:
It is interesting Maru, to read this position on e-learning.
I was looking at the four principals of association and I truly understand that they are bound up in the interaction that we talked of...
Resemblance, contiguity or proximity (salience), feedback or back propagation, balance, or entropy are all terms which can be applied to a wiki, oddly enough. I remember when I was designing this wiki which had been implemented to assist engineers in their learning of complex principles, that I was looking at all the ways in which the people would interact with it, and I identified many of the ways in which they would have a relationship with the new tool. I saw them identifying with the wiki (resemblance, contiguity or proximity - the material was salient to their needs.) I expected much feedback or back propagation, generated by posts. And above all it would seek to give a balanced view of the technology everyone was coming to grips with. And, of course, every good and well-ordered system has some elements of entropy in it. (The amount of entropy is often thought of as the amount of disorder in a system.)
So a mixed bag of goodies... don't you think?
Hi Steve!
Thanks for your visit. I am glad to know that someone understand the riddles :-)
If you are talking about a Wiki as a bag of goodies I will have to agree. I will ask you for the link to the wiki you mention, I am intrigued by it. Was it a pbwiki?
I really appreciate your post, the concepts became clearer with your example. I loved that you defined the term entropy, you are a sweethart.
See you around. love: Maru
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