I’m still thinking about Dave Cormier’s ideas so I listened to his interview with George Siemens which I found on pageflakes http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/archives/003522.html (I do seem to be finding resources of interest, by chance!)

A couple of key points/questions came out of this interview for me.

The interview starts with a discussion about the distribution of knowledge across networks and how the traditional system of validating knowledge through peer-reviewed research articles and the like, is both too hierarchical and too slow in relation to how fast knowledge is growing and changing in today’s technologically advanced world. (DC did – at the end of the interview qualify this by saying that his article was focussed on knowledge about new technologies)

According to DC, although we can still have experts, people these days just can’t individually have the spread of knowledge that is needed, hence the need to be able access networks, scan the internet, read a lot, filter and assimiliate.

Whilst listening to him talking I found myself thinking about the age old tension between depth and breadth in learning. There’s no doubt that increased connectivity will enable increased breadth, but it seems to me that what experts have is also depth. A network seems to me a very flat structure. How is depth built into a network?

Later on in the interview Dave Cormier describes his taught course with no curriculum – again qualifying this by saying that his own curriculum/subject area lends itself to this sort of approach. What really interested me at this point was that he talked about community as a curriculum model.

Now to me, a community is something very different to a network. In the words of Etienne Wenger, ‘every community is a network, but not every network is a community’. In a community ‘there is a level of identification that goes beyond degrees of connectedness.’

As yet, I have not been able to see, feel or identify with a community on this course. I can see the network very clearly, but I don’t feel a sense of community. I suspect that Dave Cormier’s course was successful not because he exploited possibilities of networks and connectivity, but because he established a community.

I have just finished listening to the UStream session and the very last 5 or 10 minutes made me prick my ears up. The question was put to SD and GS – Give one simple practical suggestion for implementing connectivism in classrooms (with children). The suggestions were

1. Connect classrooms from people round the world.
2. Encourage children to work together to participate in a real way to produce something real of benefit to society.

Neither of these ideas is new.  My first experience of networking across schools was when I was at school myself in about 1962 or 63, when a group from my school in the North of England linked with a group from a school in London (which in those days might as well have been in a different country) to work on a project. Since then I have experienced this kind of activity both nationally and internationally, both as a learner and teacher many times. The same is true of working collaboratively on ‘real’ projects to produce  a recognisably useful outcome. Interesting though that collaboarative group work doesn’t seem to have been built into this course. Not yet anyhow.

No – I think Dave Cormier is much nearer what the change might need to be and that is in a negotiated curriculum. We need to start encouraging children to negotiate their own curriculum. Even this is not new. I remember that at least 15 years ago, when teaching 5 and 6 year old children, I once started the half term’s work by asking the class to plan their own work for the 8 week period. They were perfectly able to do this and planned a wonderful topic based on a nursery rhyme, in which they were able to say what maths, english, science, geography etc. etc. we would need to work on that term.

What is new for me – but not completely new is allowing students to negotiate their assessment. I have done this in the past as well – i.e. asked children to work together to determine assessment criteria and then peer assess, but there has always been a limit to how far I have been able to go with this because of quality assurance standards.

It seems to me that for connectivism to be useful to education, some of the issues surrounding assessment and a negotiated curriculum need to be resolved. In particular, I do believe it is very important to determine whether it can be applied to young children’s education.

From the Elluminate discussion on Wednesday I thought this sounded interesting, as, if I have understood this correctly, it does seem that a negotiated curriculum could be a stumbling block for the adoption of a theory of connectivism in Higher Ed.

However, the Connectivism course site seems to be down today and I can’t access the article from there, so I’ll have to troll around on the internet and find it there.

Found it!

Cormier D (2008) Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/06/03/rhizomatic-education-community-as-curriculum/

This is an interesting article, but I’m not sure that it says anything particularly new. Basically it argues that ‘the need for external validation of knowledge either by an expert or by a constructed curriculum’, can be dispensed with.  The curriculum can be constructed by the learners.

Are we then to dispense with assessment as well? It’s not new that students want control over their learning; they want to follow their individual interests and carve their own path. But my experience is that they also want to know how well they have done, and quite often, if not very often, they want to know how they measure up against their peers. So do we also dispense with this in this model of rhizomatic education?