@Jenny and Stephen, would assessment be challenging the autonomy of learners to a certain extent? I have yet like to know if learners could have all the free choices in the assessment in HE, especially when it comes to qualification awards such as MEd and PhD. We still haven’t got the full autonomy in social network qualification awards yet, have we? I would be happy to get some certification out of the CCK experience, if that is an endorsement of full autonomy in learning
John

In day-to-day matters, we are completely autonomous. We have some basic overview meetings – we got together and drafted the weekly topics, for example (though that said, this was the first time in three offerings of the course we’ve done that; George has always done it before). We each submit our own posts and comments independently (and often unpredictably).

Generally, since I send out the newsletter, I check to see what George has done, and then fill gaps or work around that. The environment is mostly me, since George doesn’t code. The one major environment decision we’ve made was this time, when we moved from Moodle to gRSShopper. I did send him a note about a week before the course started asking is that was OK? I also dropped the wiki, but I didn’t ask about it, since nobody ever used it anyways.

As for content, we each do our own thing. We’ve never sat down together and come to any sort of agreement about what connectivism is or what its implications are. I’m sure that would be counterproductive, since we have different ideas, and standardizing on one perspective would mean eliminating the other.

George handles all the assignments and evaluation for the for-credit students (and I imagine the University of Manitoba pays him for that, though I’ve never asked about it, because I want neither the headache of marking nor the paperwork involved in getting paid).

So – in short – the two of us work very autonomously; the course represents a cooperation rather than a collaboration. We’ve also found that when we add others to the mix (Rita Kop, Dave Cormier) it works the same way, with these others adding their own unique flavour to the mix.

Autonomy as you said could be one of the most important aspects in networked learning, as I share your feelings and experience. Will try to dig deeper into this area in my research report and future blog posts.

John