“I don’t think it’s really shyness that leads some of us to prefer asynchronous communication.”

For me, asynchronous participation is probably the single greatest affordance of networked learning, because it offers a unique combination of features that were previously never possible simultaneously:

• slow reflection like when reading a book, and
• quick reactivity, almost like in oral exchanges.

In the face-to-face classrooms of my own school time, the relentless urge for “participation” was an urge for oral discussions that were inevitably shallow and mostly boring.

Asynchronous discussions like in blogs or forums, by contrast, can be far more motivating, in particular when there is a large diversity to pick from.

For both forums and blogs in Plenk, there were two major options of how to read them and pick from. Forums could be either read online via the browser, or subscribed into your inbox, and blogs could either be retrieved from the Daily, or read in one’s own RSS reader. For me, these options are so radically different that I would be very curious to know which participants chose which options. (I wonder if the various surveys and research projects will unearth these behaviours.) Chris Jobling nicely expresses a view that I share:

“The bottom line is, that I don’t usually like going some where to interact. This forum is a rare exception.”

I prefer reading the forum online (because I hate an overcrowded inbox) but I like to pick my blog readings from my local RSS reader. Picking the Plenk posts from among the other posts that the participants wrote during this ten weeks was a little extra effort but it was very interesting to get a sense of their contexts.

It seems, however, that few people favored this method of importing the feed list (OPML) into one’s own reader. Nobody complained that the OPML was rarely updated, and so I did not, either (although Stephen explicitly suggested this last time). Probably, RSS as a tool for end users is really dying, and is superseded by Twitter as vehicle for announcing resources? This would, sadly, reverse the move to the asynchronous, because the hectic speed of Twitter favors a more synchronous trend.

• managing/ dealing with/ traversing pieces of information might well be called knowledge management because it generates or grows knowledge.

Navigating, or traversing information nodes like websites or desktop folders, discovering links and creating shortcuts, is a great way to create or strengthen conceptual connections.

However, I don’t duck out of the inevitable D-I-K (-W) definition started in the forums. Here is an old answer that does not yet account for connectivist relatedness patterns. Today, I would also put more emphasis on the diverging usages of the term “knowledge”, in particular

• the knowledge in the brain of a knower, and
• the “knowledge” of the society, accumulated like a tower in libraries and journals and encyclopedias — which is a legitimate and common usage of the term, although it might be seen as mere information.
   

More interesting than a single definition of knowledge, are the new distinctions of knowledge types that are afforded by connectivist notions:

• propositional knowledge that links subjects to predicates,
• knowledge that needs network structures with cross references rather than hierarchical tree structures to be represented, but still has binary (1 or 0) strength cross connections that either latch or not (”snap in” knowledge), and
• connective knowledge that allows for initially weak and strengthening connections.

The strengthening of connections also happens when I am traversing my folder structure and the cross referencing folder shortcuts of my (very imperfect) personal information repository.

Many new affordances and tools have made it easier to tackle the network structures: from links such as hyperlinks or library cross references or folder “shortcuts”, to relational databases. And a given item can simultaneously reside in two virtual “folders” when you consider “stacks” of items assigned to the same “tag” or search keyword.

But when it comes to visually representing these stacks, the networked characteristics is quickly lost. You don’t “see” how an items belongs to two stacks unless there are connection lines drawn that connect the respective icons. The connections that are so crucial to connectivism, are still not catered to by most of the PIM tools. And the networked structure is still the step-brother of the hierarchical structure, because it still lacks one of the three modalities verbal, visual, virtual.

This is particularly inappropriate for new, emerging topics that are typically to be positioned on an interdisciplinary bridge between two established baskets, or for complex scenarios that cannot be represented by a ramified, i.e. merely complicated, tree-structure.

And it unequally affects the three levels of connectivist connections (neural, conceptual, and personal/ external):

• The user’s information artefacts in their file storage obviously affect the external level of connections between resources, and
• similarly, the person-to-person level as soon as communication such as emails or memos are concerned.

While these sort of connections of artefacts can usually be classified according to discrete criteria such as temporal, geographical, personal provenience such as projects or conferences, i.e., have no problem with the hierarchical structure, the conceptual connections are often harmed by hierarchical classifications.

Once we engage more thoroughly with our favorite tools, we will discover many flaws, partly in what functionality and usability they are missing, and partly in how poorly we leverage their functionality that is already available.

An example for the latter, wielding problems, is addressed in this subthread about italics. Bold and italics are a very old and basic affordance of digital reading and writing, and they replaced underline and spaced letters of the typewriter a long time ago. But we still don’t leverage their potential for skimming on a macro level versus slowing down on a micro level. Instead, nebulous ideas about gradual differences of emphasis, or even about mere typographic aesthetics, are still taught.

On the other side, it is amazing how patiently we put up with the flaws of our daily routine software. For example, the moodle forums. As soon as a thread gathered 10 or 15 posts, it is impossible to navigate. And no, this issue can not be overcome by using the dropdown options of nested/ threaded/ flat, although we are led to think that it is is only our own fault that we have wielding problems. Many possible improvements are waiting here for sponsors of the great opensource software (or for the grace of its developers).

Ideally, a visual interface should be available for such big threads. I once assembled an early thread of CCK08 into such a visual overview. For a text-only overview, it would be useful to swap subthreads if an older one gets longer than a newer one. Or at least color them by age. And make them easily addressable (have you tried to link to an individual subthread? You have to switch display modes again and again). And while I am at it: Why is Moodle’s blog feature so strange?

Often, the plethora of options and features obscures the fact that a little useful functionality is still missing.

Just consider such a simple thing as drawing a connection line between two items in your folders on your hard drive, if you want to indicate that there is a vague relationship that cannot be explicated by a subfolder, or a tag name. Most likely you have to switch to a dedicated application which is for Personal Information Management, or for visualization, but not for both, let alone for your files.

A prototype demo of how it might work, is linked from a short paper for the PKM2010 workshop, by Malte and me.

There are several screencasts available, showing the same two examples (animals, and conference abstracts) in several variants and program versions, which have different deficits. (For Gnome/ Nautilus, there is even more available now).

The great advantage, IMHO, is the ergonomic combination of visual overview and textual details (see my previous thoughts about this). If you are willing to do without this combination, you might import the terms (file names, labels…) into Cmap Tools (using File > Import > Propositions as text …). But not even this import is reasonably supported, because the terms are initially cluttered on a huddle of concepts hiding each other.

So I am still waiting for something that neither exists nor is being built, but needs to be built.

It appeared on his list right after “1. Pursue your passion” and “2. Read widely“. which I interprete as 1. depth and 2. breadth — the irreconcilable ideals that Jenny recently discussed with Stephen. Picking and filtering can, in a way, reconcile them:

• Picking ones’s niches and pursuing them in pretty good depth,
• but picking them from sufficiently diverse breadth.

In our time of information overabundance, this seems to me the only way to balance disciplinary and transdisciplinary virtues.

In my ESL understanding, it is therefore a critical skill in the sense of “critical” as pivotal, decisive, crucial. If “critical” necessarily involves critique and evaluating the truth, this is a totally different emphasis, of course. Resonance, as Jenny and I explored it, has much to do with picking — unlike its mentions in the forums discussion here and here where resonance sounded more like a fuzzy variant of confirming/ evaluating a single thought.

The inclination to pick some topics and “let go” all the rest, seems like a mindset that not everybody is comfortable with (see Rita’s post for more about feeling comfortable in semi-autonomous environments). Is this “mindset” a matter of preferences, habits, and styles, or is it a requirement that applies for everybody? Despite my ESL limitations, I tend to believe the latter.

In the past when the “Nuremberg funnel” mechanisms of stuffing content into students’ heads were not yet very sophisticated, the capability to learn a lot of subject matter was a good proxy for the capability to learn the real important stuff later. The chaotic teaching of professors who had no clue of how to mediate content, led us students to developing skills of self-directed learning. So the teaching of useless stuff was useful for learning how to learn. Learning of relevant competencies worked only indirectly, not by transmission but by induction. And assessing the memorized content was a fair proxy of assessing the induced capabilities that were really important later.

The problem is when we forget about the indirectness, and think that the content is the true value, and optimize and maximize the content and throughput through the funnel. Then measuring the memorized subject matter is no longer an indicator for expectable later success, no longer a proxy for valuable learning.

Jenny reminded us that “assessment has such an impact on so many people’s lives”. Therefore we need to be aware of when we are assessing proxies rather than the real learning that has an impact on people’s lives.

“why we have so many learning / educational theories. Shouldn’t we have just one, that works? And the rest rejected?”.

See the recording at 33 - 44 mins. My “theory” about the proliferation of learning theories is as follows.

Many educators won’t admit to themselves that their own cognitive style is not the only best one that leads to the most effective learning. So naturally, there are problems to reconcile some students’ real learning processes with the predicted progress. And therefore, ever new theories are needed to describe the apparent discrepancies.

Even worse: When studies are conducted to reject a particular theory of underlying principles, the bias underlying the study setting and the bias of the experimentators, is likely to skew the results or yield the notorious “no significant evidence” (thanks to Glen for the bias video link!) One striking bias is already the measuring of short-term outcomes of a limited study period, which clearly favors a certain type of knowledge that is not typical for the gradually growing understanding of real-world relations.

Stephen observed that the “underlying principles” sort of theories are less frequent than the theories of taxonomies that merely describe the surface, and that the latter are the easier way. Given the pressure of young researchers to publish much and publish scientific evidence for their theories, it is understandable that this type of theories proliferates.

(Admitted, my above “theory” is very simplistic, and I won’t be able to provide statistical evidence for it!)

Now “Connects knowledge” sounds good (upper left quadrant of slide 12 of Wheeler’s presentation). But does this equate to connective knowledge as in Connectivism?

As I understand it, when it connects RDF triples, it only connects knowledge in the way jig-saw puzzle pieces are connected such that they snap in. The puzzle metaphor was used previously to illustrate the opposite of complexity (which was illustrated by the weather). And the knowledge represented in the stored propositions is all binary, true or false, and does not allow for the type of conceptual connections that follow the neural metaphor (weak and gradually strengthening). So, if knowledge is being composed of a complicated structure of such propositions, will it allow for knowledge about complex processes?

Stephen once talked about the inference engines involved here and plausibly explained the difference of this sort of knowledge from connective knowledge. As I have understood it, the former is just “snap-in” knowledge that needs to be complemented (”augmented” ?) by the latter, connective, knowledge.

Take the forums, for example, the classical component. You only need one start address and can follow all discussions, in contrast to the blogs where you need to rely on your own selections or other readers’ recommendations. Such a central place quite naturally attracts writers who can expect more readers or more attention, just as the classical Roman forum (marketplace) attracted bargainers. And the forum is convenient for the buyers (readers), too.

This does not mean that everybody loves them. Such central structures just exert centripetal forces in a natural way, like downhill grade drift. I, too, find myself posting there sometimes, instead of blogging, although I don’t like them. Like in a real-life marketplace, or bazaar, its crowdedness and noise and bustle and speed, is not for me. John, Roy, and Jenny wrote a paper “Blogs and Forums as Communication and Learning Tools in a MOOC” about this choice of preference (and I had the pleasure to participate in their early discussions). While blogs (and PLEs) are like front porches, a forum (and an LMS) is, in some way, like a marketplace.

But a typical LMS shows more than forums-like centrality. It is often a centralistic mindset that reigns here, which embraces a central source of uniform prescriptions, regulations and predeterminations. In the LMS I was recently, the LMS even controlled how single forums postings could be opened in a new windows: only using a predefined button, and the “Back” button was disabled.

Comparing this centralism to the above metaphors, the cathedral lends itself to represent this.

Advocates of such centralistically controlled environments seem to have a strong faith about the superiority of their way of doing it, or maybe don’t even question their preference.

So the choice between PLE and centralistic LMS is also a matter of preference and mindset, just as well as the choice between blogs and central forums. But while the forums choice depends on the styles of the students, the LMS usage is often influenced by an unaware preference of the teacher.