'LEARNING NETWORKS & CONNECTIVE KNOWLEDGE ' - OBSERVATIONS AND REFLECTIONS

I am very grateful to my colleague Peter Bryant for passing on to me the chapter on 'Learning Networks' by Stephen Downes which is the first chapter in a book of contributione edited by H H Yang and S G Yuen in a book entitled ' Collective Intelligence & e-learning 2.0' (2010) IGI Global. It reflects very well principles I've long held about learning and knowledge. Below I identify key issues arising for me and how we might make use of them in way we promote WBL

An underpinning principle is that knolwedge is not contained in any one place, neither within University nor, indeed, part of the brain; it is distrributed across a wide range of people and sources. [ Note. I think this has significance re iWBL's 'A' group of learning descriptors which are all about range of sources we draw upon]

Downes focuses on the 'Personal Learning Environment' where the 'management of learning migrates from the institution to the learner' (p12). It allows the learner not only to consume learning/knowledge but to produce them as wellL 'Learning therefore evolves from being a transfer of content and knowledge to the production of content and knwowledge# (p12)

In contrast to traditional institution led learning 'e-learning 2.0 takes a "social pieces" loosley joined approach that combines the use of discrete but complementary tools and services - such as blogs, wikis and other social software - to support the creation of ad-hoc learning communities' (12)

Downes cites the following 8 'Ds' as characterising 'network learning' : Decentralised, Distributed, Disintermediated (ie by-passses central editing), Diaaggragated (Bundles of 'small pieces loosely joined'_, dis-integrated (not part of 'one' brand) Democratic (freedom to negotiate networks) Dynamic (always changing), Disaggregated (Happens anywhere)

How to evaluate effectiveness of a network?
'The mechanism for attaining the reliability of connective knowledge is fundamentally the same as that of attaining reliability in other areas, the promotion of diversity , through the empowering of individual entities and the reduction in the influence of well-connected entities, is essentially a way of creating extra sets of eyes within the network' (18) . He then goes on to pose 4 criteria which link nicely, I think with our own learning descriptors: diversity, autonomy, connectedness and openness'

We might well add these questions to our decriptrors:

DIVERSITY - 'Did the process involve the widest possible spectrum of points of view?
'Did people who interpret the matter one way, and from one set of assumptions, interact with people who approach the matter from a different perspective?'

AUTONOMY ' Did views come arise from contributors ' 'own accord' or were they acting 'at behest' of 'some external agency?

INTERACTIVITY or CONNECTEDNESS: 'Is the knowledge being produced the product of an interaction between the members or is it a (mere) aggregation of the members' perspectives? A different type of knowledge is produced one way as opposed to the other. Just as the human mind does not determine what is seen in front of it by merely counting pixels, nor either does a process intended to create public knowledge'

OPENNESS - 'Is there a mechanism that allows a given perspective to be entered into the system, to be heard and interacted with others?' (18) [ Could be applied to the organisational learning descriptors - I am working on]

' Learning...occurs in communities where the practice of learning is the participation in the community. A learning activity is in essence a conversation undertkane between the learner and other members of the community. The conversation in the Web 2.0 era consists not only of words but of images, video , mult-media and more. The conversation forms a rich tapestry of resources, dynamic and intercoonected, created not only by experts, but by all members of the community, incluidng learners' 18-19 , [ Link with 'Listen to Your Organisation Learning]

This for me is a telling point, that the 'on-line ' community is not just an adjunct that follows on from a 'course' but should lead TO the course

'..the community is the primary unit of learning and ...the instruction and the learning resources are secondary, arising out of and only because of the community' 20

'learning will be available not in learning institutions but in any given environment in which they [the learners] find themselves'

And finally, back to the PLE (Personal Learning Environment) : '...the heart of the concept of the PLE is that it is a tool that allows a learner (or anyone) to engage in a distributed environment consisting of a network of people, sources and resources' (20)

For me, Downes' chapter re-affirms many discussions over last few years I have had with Aboubakr Moteleb and Alan Durrant and lately with Peter Bryant as ro what is at the heart of WBL. Dare I say that, for me at least, it is not 'work' but the kind of learning networks Downes describes so elegantly. Could the research group Alan is sugesting we set up privilege 'learning networks' over WBL? And then we might review the learning descriptors - of which i am a great fan - in that light adding some of the criteia Downes cites in this chapter

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