CCK09- Back on track after finding anchors

Hearing that I´m not the nly one who´s overwhelmed by personal and professional issues within the CCK09 community has encouraged me to get myself together and find a moment to think.

I´ve been silent for a while and I find the crucial factor in my self-silencing process is the inhibiting and repressing power of self-consciousness. After not actively participating for a while there started to be a growing wall that made it harder for me to connect and I had a hard time overcoming. My connections felt diluted and it became difficult to “open my mouth” in front of people who had smartly kept evolving through the course.

I wanted to go on, but I saw myself  wandering about, lacking nodes, lacking anchors. And then Nicola published a most inspiring post explaining how she´s been handling her connectivity being reduced to her mobile phone. Right after that Luz wrote a post about how she felt lost and was founding her way back into the course with Eduardo´s help. I thanked them both for the inspiration and Nicola told me a delightful story on how a student from CCK08 felt “virtually disabled” at some point. I understood and liked the analogy very much. I was suddenly interacting again and it felt easier to get back on track.

So Luz and Nicola have managed to engage me back in, when I felt I was falling out. Listening to them explain their efforts and struggle through the course and their motivation to continue  has been a pull I very much needed. Their openness and transparency about it unleashed a stream of empathy with these two participants, a stream which dragged me into Moodle again. I needed an anchor, and they became mine.

This post sounds a lot like group therapy.

CCK09: Synchronizing

Last week the course focused on network characteristics and attributes. As usual, I´m having a harder time with the neural aspects of networks and connections than with the social. I found the Network for Newbies presentation, by Barry Wellman, helpful to put netwoks in context. He differentiates between 3 ways to look at reality:

1. Categories: Possess one or more common properties (men, developed countries)
2. Groups: United within a tight boundary (family, work group)
3. Networks: Set of connected units (friendship, organizational, Internet)

We will be seeing more about the differences between networks and groups this week, but a few characteristics that distinguish networks are, according to Wellman:

• they are “more than the sum of its parts”
• they consist of one or more nodes
• they are self-shaping and reflexive
• they scale up to networks of networks

Having understood networks better within their context, a concept that really struck me was dealt with during the Elluminate session: synchronization, which is literally:

1. to happen at the same time

2. to represent or arrange (events) to indicate coincidence or coexistence

(Merriem-Webster Online Dictionary)

Here´s the visual example of synchronization George Siemens and Stephen Downes showed during the session:

Since I have a harder time with the neural aspects, what really attracted me about synchronization is its social aspect: how it is a natural tendency and how it can be a dangerous limitation. We tend to synchronize with people “like us”, people who agree with us, share our viewpoints. That feels good, and yet interacting with people we don´t naturally synchronize with is much more enriching, it adds new possibilities we might not have thought of when we get trapped in comfortable “endogamic” connecting. So it´s a lost opportunity not to focus on interacting with people who don´t share our views, who take very different stands, who challenge our ideas and make us look for answers to unexpected questions.

CCK09 has just started: The Iceberg of new learning enviroments

The Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Course has just started and I´m excited and overwhelmed at the same time. It´s only participants introducing themselves so far, but we can all see the level is high, with lots of people from last year coming back for more. A unique chance to learn, share questions and try to answer them making the effort to view things from a different angle or… through different networks, right? I already have the vibrant feeling of being in front of the tip of an iceberg of immense dimensions.

When I was in third grade my teacher gave us a poem about a kid and a horse by Antonio Machado. It made me shiver and I let my imagination flow with it. The teacher, when she saw me “daydreaming”, came to me and said “Don´t daydream with the poem. Just tell me what the author is trying to tell us through this poem”. Somehow that sounded twistedly simple and I wasn´t going to be content, but I had to deal with many, many teachers after that who thought that way and didn´t know better.

Spain in particular is a country where students rarely raise their hands to ask questions, at least that´s the way it was some years ago and I hope it´s true that some things are changing. That´s not only through primary and secondary school but through college as well. All through college I had to struggle with the feeling that it was awkward to ask the teacher questions, or just to interrupt him to say I didn´t understand. I was surprised, shocked even when I saw how natural that is in the United States, how natural the dialogue between teacher and students.

So being part of a new learning enviroment (can we say “ecosystem”?) is pretty much a dream come true. If I can keep up with it and manage to take time “from under the stones” (Spanish idiom ) to live the experience to the fullest, then I´ll be diving around the iceberg.

This is George Siemens saying hi to all of us and explaining why he wants to do this again.

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