I’ve been dipping into this stream of information related to connectivism.    The idea that this is a way is exciting, and I love the way that this vast “class” of affiliated people is communicating through the use of the CCK11 hashtag.   That in itself seems full of possibilities for community learning.   “fragmentation is the easy part” but how to pull together what Siemens calls “a narrative coherence.”   Concurrently, I’m taking a graduate class called “Doing Disability Differently” which is about how disability as an idea is constructed and exists alongside the idea of ability, as something opposite – a kind of modernist binary.   it’s a great class, terrific prof, smart and thoughtful peers, lots of love.   but more self-reflective than I expected in terms of thinking of how the systems of education and medicine shape our concepts of knowledge and social hierarchy.   So my usual frustration around these ideas (the idea, for example, that people are more comfortable with disability when they can taxonomise where it fits on a scale) is nicely countered by this stream of tweets about a possible different way of shaping knowledge.    So might the methods of CCK11 be a way of looking at “de-schooling” our ideas?  “We want to disrupt the notion of what it means to be a teacher,” he says.  “We want to disrupt the notion of what it means to be a student.”

I’m also listening to Sir Ken Robinson’s Q & A in which he talks about the intention of The Element and his upcoming sequel, tentatively called “Finding Your Element: How To Live a Life of Passion and Purpose.”   Sir Ken’s blog led me to a fascinating little video that I’ve tried to order – we’ll see if they can translate the shipping order from England to send to Canada – “We Are The People We’ve Been Waiting For.”   I think it was a CCK11 post that took me to something by him, and from there to his twitter page, and from there to…

It’s odd not to think that this process – what is called in my disability class “discursive” / discourse – enacted through the CCK11 tag is not just the product of an attentional gap but is actually educative in a new way.   It’s been fun to visit the blogs of other CCK11 folks and see that we are all confused, and watch how people process this and become okay with it as we are given permission to be 🙂  George Seimens is inspiring in his thinking about alternatives: “the problem of education does not concern me quite as much as the solutions to the problems of education are starting to concern me.  Education is not about building better Googlers… not about building better corporate citizens, not about better employees for organizations.  …  Education has one vital task, to prepare individuals for the vital combat for lucidity; to prepare individuals to a be part of society; to prepare individuals to contribute, to create, to share, to interact”  and goes on to say, “we need systems that create optimal capacity for connection.”    As Siemens talks about the way that social structures reflect learning methods, in terms of almost endless kinds of social media methods, “in many ways we are renegotiating the perameters by which our society will function democracticaly based on the software tools available to us.”

So this seems like a great opportunity to explore and learn differently, in both micro and macro ways, from some masterful teachers and peers.