Connectivism: Danger or Opportunity
June 5th, 2006This is a great little paper on some of the changes organizations who need deal with training or education are facing due to the explosion of connectivism in society. George Siemens presented this “white paper” recently at the Google Developers Conference.
This ties in with some struggles I’ve been having with how schools seem increasingly driven to “protect” students from connectivism. I hear other school district technology directors talking about stronger filtering, going to RADIUS authentication, locking the networks down tighter, preventing access to virtually every interpersonal communication tool available: chat; blogs; social networking sites; VOIP; and of course all peer-to-peer sharing.
IT folks take filtering and control quite seriously, and generally don’t know how to take my approach that focuses on filtering limited to essential things (pornography mostly), and increased reliance of self-monitoring. Education about responsible use is critical, and should be teacher led. I view these as essential life skills, and see most of the accompanying issues as a routine behavior stuff – no different than students scrawling crude or rude grafitti on the bulletin board in the hall, or bringing a girlie magazine to school. We have expectations about these things, and rules to deal with them. End of story.
We can’t isolate and artificially protect children the majority of the day when they are no longer behind our filters. I personally choose to focus on the skills that students need in that real world environment, not the “techno-no-zone” of schooling…the “bubble” is artificial.
Where I’d like to see connectivism go is in the direction of personalized learning environments, or perhaps what Siemens calls “learning ecologies”. However, I’d like to take that idea in the K-12 realm to be a PLE that would follow the student through school, and then beyond. I think we can take existing technologies that build social relationships and harness these for learning AND instruction….