Presentation: Viewing Open Education from the Perspectives of Knowledge Building and Connectivism
I wrote earlier about preparing to give a guest lecture in a class called KMD 1002: Knowledge Communities: Patterns and Practices, where I assigned three resources for class preparation: a CIDER talk by Terry Anderson about Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy. I also ended up assigning a paper by Marlene Scardamalia: Collective Cognitive Responsibility for the Advancement of Knowledge and one by George Siemens: Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age.
I struggled quite a bit when preparing the actual talk. A nice feature was that I was given access to the class discussion forum and wiki, which they had used to summarize talks and discussions from previous classes, so I read through that, and thought about my material could integrate with what they had already been discussing, and the questions they had been asking.
I have been thinking a lot about the two learning theories connectivism and knowledge building. Both offer a possible model for online social learning, but they are very different. I made a first attempt at sketch out some of the strengths and weaknesses I saw in each of them, and listing some of the issues that I think are worth discussing, and which I am hoping to explore further in the future (and certainly during my PhD).
The material in this presentation is quite raw, but I would love any feedback and comments. I’ve embedded the 37 minute long presentation below, but you can also download just the PDF of the slides, or the MP3 of the audio. The original video (with no slides) also contains the Q&A session at the end (which I have not included below).
Stian
June 9th, 2010 @ 9:37 pm
[...] to get it going. Stian Haklev, one of the founders of the peer2peer University (p2pu), mentions in a recent presentation overviewing open education that the early stages of network building can be lonely and can take years of blogging into thin [...]
June 17th, 2010 @ 7:09 am
[...] Haklev shares a good talk on Viewing Open Education from the Perspectives of Knowledge Building and Connectivism. He raises important questions about different structures for learning and knowledge growth [...]
June 19th, 2010 @ 9:57 am
[...] 19, 2010 · Leave a Comment George Siemens comments on Stian Haklev’s recent presentation on open education and connectivism. From the post: Given the social opportunities around new [...]
June 25th, 2010 @ 3:24 am
[...] Presentation: Viewing Open Education from the Perspective of Knowledge Building and Connectivism: Stian Haklev video [...]
September 1st, 2010 @ 9:55 pm
Hi there, Stian!
I had this post as a long opened tab in my browser, and only today I managed to find some time to read/see it. I wanted to comment on a few things:
I agree with you that we don’t have enough (and easy) tools available as to create an experience alike to that of KF. Then again, the user base of KF is way smaller than that of the wide network. So the question remains if it’s possible (and even if it makes sense) to create such tools. Last year I started an experiment in Colombia with open courses, and I ended up creating some mash-ups using Yahoo Pipes, which actually make a little easier the tracking of blog posts and comments. I talked about that earlier this year: http://bit.ly/bjzj0W I’ve been experimenting with the creation of conversation graphs, and now I’m trying to create them automatically from the content available in the student’s blogs. I do think that can be a very useful tracking tool for both teachers and students.
I’ve offered three open courses so far (“Tiny Open Online Courses”, to be precise) in my country, and I have run exactly into some of the barriers that you mention in your presentation (that 80%). The interesting thing (I’m not sure that’s the best word) is that I’ve seen that low confidence in their learning skills in the teachers participating in the courses. This means that these kind of courses, at least in my own environment, need to have more structure than that found in CCK*, for example. I think we need “transition experiences” in order to ‘reboot’ the perception of students (in my case, students who are teachers themselves) about their own learning.
Clearly, this transition has to do with tools (use the tools they are familiar with, and avoid at the beginning new websites that create new points of attention) and methodology (give progressive control over the learning experience), among other things. At the end, the goal would be that learners have the skills to learn on their own, using the tools they find relevant.
I expect to present some of the lessons I’ve learned so far in OpenEd in November, but I wanted to chime in and let you know about the things we’re doing in Colombia. Like you said, we need to know at least who else is working in this stuff.
Kudos on the presentation. Lots of good questions to think about!