“Grand Narratives” George Siemens says in the Connectivism class that he is coteaching with Stephen Downes, “provide us with a large umbrella that we can use to make sense of the world.” Thus starts the current class – or at least that is how it started for me. Because the course takes place over a variety of online venues – other people in the class will have it start differently. If there are 1900 people in the course, there are likely 1900 different responses to the complex stimula we will engage with, and 1900 different meanings we will concoct as we go. Fair enough. I won’t be enjoying the synchronous events as they come at bad times (during my sleep cycle) due to time zone variance. Therefore the news and ideas from this blog will be entirely from written or pre filmed text. As with the idea of grand narratives (got to love the phrase) we also hear from George, this time in his slide presentation on What is Connectivism: that we build frameworks in knowledge to avoid paralysis due to so much information. As I reflect on this idea I know that Heifetz (2000) discusses paralysis (in slightly different terms) as a natural response to any complex adaptive problem, because by nature we feel overwhelmed in the presence of that which we cannot control.

Complexity from Werner Pyke on Vimeo. complexity is the science that surrounds us

I just spent the last I were watching a couple of videos. Both were engendered at a conference that I did not know existed, the personal democracy forum (PDF 2009) in New York City. On the website it says it started about seven years ago. That's about right, since I am not really an “early adopter,” I seem to find things when they been around about a decade. In most cases, however that is a decade before anyone else I know knows it and that leaves me square in the middle between what's coming and what's already been. Before I go into a few thoughts about what I saw and give you the link to these two videos ,(which are very much worth your time), let me say a little bit about being “on the long tail.” I confess I haven't read the book by Chris Anderson, but it was explained to me with the story of a record store. It used to be that if you had a record store and people came in to buy your records, you could only stop what was new or high selling in the marketplace. But now, if you have an online record store, you can stock everything because there will be some people out there who want the most obscure record in the world. Even the most obscure record will turnover on average four times a year. In the last six months.......Interested? Follow the Read More link

  Personal learning environments (PLEs) have been part of the discussion surrounding the future(s) of education since at least 2006.  The signs are lclear that in the future life long learning will be controlled by the learner - therefore it seems pre requisite for efficiency to put some time into thinking about our PLEs. Provoked by a picture of Joan Vinall-Cox's office as her personal learning environment, I became intriqued to explore the topic further - after all we all have offices, we all use different web technologies, how far have others gotten in their design process?  A more important question to me is whether and to what extent knowing your PLE is useful to improving your learning.  Because I am musing about what makes sense as foundational for the proposed Future(s) of Education project, I decided to work towards diagramming (and potentially redesigning) my PLE.

Hi everyone, Maybe I am in a holistic mood today, but I am passing on this video, shown to me by a self study educator at the Castle Conference: Thank you to Cynthia Nicol!  As one of the authors says, at some point everything is connected.  Things on my mind today include the Russian/Georgian issue and a recent article that suggested to me it was really about oil - sounds like the US in Iraq in different colors.  From my vantage networking people and groups interesting in the future of education is the most interesting game in town, but it really isn't very different from the work of anyone who is trying to move a segment of thought and action ahead. Made in 1977 this is well worth the nine minutes it takes     via videosift.com