I’m thinking expanding the scope of my thesis (probably at a time when I should be thinking of focusing a bit more, but never mind). Instead of perpetuating the dividing walls between schools, universities and businesses, perhaps I could look at broader themes and trends and then bring them down to a practical level for each. Kind of what George Siemens has done with Knowing Knowledge – although there’s no way I could write anything as magnificent!
Stephen Downes links today in his OLDaily newsletter to an article by Dave Snowden entitled Natural Numbers, Networks & Communitiies. Dave realizes that attempts to create a taxonomy for knowledge management followed by forcing people to adapt to it does not work. Instead, he advocates embracing the messiness of learning and development through informal communities.
He goes on to talk about natural numbers and the amount of people who should be involved at each stage which isn’t relevant to what I’m doing. What is relevant, however, is his identification of a ‘messy learning’ approach to knowledge management and the ways in which this can be harnessed in a positive way. If only schools were that responsive…?
In the 21st century it is almost impossible to be an expert on anything. There is so much information – and indeed knowledge – out there that we could only ever become experts in ever-diminishing content areas. Instead, we need to ourselves become, and train our students to likewise become, experts in connecting knowledge. This is where connectivism comes in:
Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.
The theory is advocated most passionately by George Siemens via his connectivism.ca blog, in his article on connectivism at elearnspace, on the Learning Circuits blog, an article for the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning and his excellent book (available via PDF or on his wiki), Knowing Knowledge.
Some notes:
(There is a connectvism online conference running in February 2007 that should be worth checking out…)?
