This week has been one of mass confusion as I try to get settled into the course and make sense of all the materials available to me. I've finally resigned to gleaning from the articles and perusing the posts to stimulate my thoughts about Connectivism and how it might apply to my life. The thoughts below are probably far too random to make much sense to anyone but myself, but here's goes nothing...
I was inspired to look up the lyrics to Little Boxes which is a song from 1962 which I know I have never heard! At first, I thought that people in this song gathered themselves together in homogeneous groups possibly for the reason of insulating from others that are not like themselves, but on a second reading, I see that the writer blames schools for making us all the same - doctors, lawyers, etc. We all grow up in a little box and grow up to have children who are in those same boxes who grow up to have children who, well you get the point! The song doesn't give any suggestions for change or improvement, but it was written at the dawn of the sixties. The Wellman article (Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism) challenges whether we still live in those boxes or whether technology, specifically the Internet and other Web devices have freed us from our own "ticky-tacky."
I started thinking about my own little box. Are all the people within my "network" just like me? If they are, just how like me are they and if they aren't, how are we different? Wellman makes the point that we increasingly use technology to reach out to others while ignoring those that back in the day would have been our "group." For example, through email, snail mail, cell phone, and, especially, Facebook, I am able to keep in contact with many of my friends and co-workers back east. We have frequent, sometimes daily contact and yet, I do not know the name of even one of my neighbors in my apartment complex - not one - even though I've lived there for two years! I've made a choice to stay in contact with my back east friends and pretty much ignore those in my immediate vicinity. Way back when before the Internet, our neighbors were our closest friends and, many times, our co-workers as well.
So, that begs the question, is my "ticky-tacky" box bigger than it would have been in years past? Is it possible that I am maintaining multiple little boxes of comrades just like me? All I need do is take a look at my Gmail labels: "Running", "Tucson Friends", "East Coast Friends", "Family", "Work." Aren't these my little boxes? My life seems so compartmentalized these days. Most of my meetings with friends are one-on-one - very individual. I have lunch with this one, run with that one, make an appointment to call another. In the GOD (good old days), I might have run across the street to my best friend's house six times a day. Now I'm overloaded with ways to keep in touch because we now demand more individual attention from our friends and family.
On the other hand, I am now able to accomplish so much more with many more people. Wellman uses the term "glocalization" to describe groups working independent of their surroundings. Although each person in the group has their own local space and they are all feel connected, there is little consciousness of the spaces in between. I have so many examples of this in my own life right now, it's not funny, including engaging in a very successful long-distance relationship that has recently made the jump from "glocal" to local.
Elluminate session 1 (Wednesday September 10, 2008 11:00 am CST)
This week I dropped in on the first Elluminate (live) session. Although there was much that sparked thought, I'd like to touch on just one or two things quickly. There was discussion about the impact of an individual's web-presence. How do our clicks and comments effect how others see us? What are the implications of our web personalities? How much credence should we give to the web presence of others? Where do we draw that line? I'm told that my name was Googled before I was interviewed for my current position and I am always careful about my web presence because I know that people are going to look. I am 47years-old, for goodness sakes, I'm too old to post my most embarrassing moments, but what about my replies to discussion boards? Will someone in the future care if I posted to the Gackt Facebook page? Will listening to Japanese music work for or against me? Will my FB friends work for or against me? What about friends of my friends? When my children were in high school, they had Live Journal pages. I gained access to those pages and learned more than I wanted to know about my kids and WAY more than I wanted to know about their friends! What happens when one of these pages shows up 20 years from now? Will a person still be judged by their high school actions? All I can say here is thank goodness there's no evidence from my high school years!
Another participant, Lisa M. Lane, asked, "to what extent do we divide our personalities based on the type of forum?" Our work and "home" personalities are blurring. My co-workers have only to visit the aforementioned Facebook page or look at my iTunes list to get a glimpse into my "home" personality. In fact, just about anyone in the world can find out what type of music I like, what I do in my spare time, where I went to school, and what I do for a living in just a few clicks. Do I care? Should I? What good or evil could a person do with this information? Several of my co-workers have created alternate personalities in Second Life. Their Second Life personalities now have their own Facebook pages with only their SL friends. What effect does this splitting of personalities have on our own idea of who we are? Maybe it doesn't have any effect. Maybe it's an outward extension of who we wish we were or perhaps our lives are so open that we are creating alternate personalities to control what the world sees of us.
Connectivism
So where does that leave me at the end of week one in my knowledge of Connectivism? Not very far, I'm afraid! I'm just beginning to make some space in my schemas for connectivism. At some point, one of the instructors stated that connectivism goes beyond knowledge as a qualitative or quanitiative property. It draws on sources that are not language based and therefore are more difficult to define than behaviorism or constructivism, for example. Hmmmm... I'm still chewing on that one! I was reminded though of James Burke's work, The Axmaker's Gift, in which Burke writes about how human inventions so fundamentally change our lives that our brains change and never quite function the same. The question here is has technology so changed our lives that we may now learn in ways that are fundamentally different from previous generations? Does instant access to answers change the way we think? What are the ways in which we cannot return to pre-technological means? And what does all this mean for our students and the future of teaching and learning?
Questions, questions, questions...
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