She prefers to visit discussion pages, while I prefer to get notifications – perhaps by email, but more ideally through an RSS reader like GoogleReader. But it is true that I also like to have the posts link back to somewhere where the entire thread is available. Does it really need to be hosted in a fixed site like Moodle though? or could we have a tool that automatically put together the thread on a given topic by pulling out the relevant posts from individual blogs? Perhaps Stephen Downes’ gRSShopper will do that, so maybe I should have another go at installing it for myself and seeing what it can do.

While it seems to me that the basic structure provided by pingback/trackback tools is exactly what Stephen is calling for, there are problems with take-up and implementation which are preventing them from really doing the job.

With regard to take-up, not  everyone implements them and so we can’t just take it for granted that a blog post in response to another will actually show up as part of the conversation. And with regard to implementation, when pingback and/or trackback are used the excerpt that shows up as a comment in the original post is often not illuminating. Is there any way to ensure that all participants implement these tools and that the excerpts are sufficient to allow the reader to decide whether or not to click through for more detail?

Perhaps it is because they are offended by its self-description as a “theory”.  Jaap has pointed out, “the incommensurability of the Einstein View and the Toolkit View” of what is a theory, and I made a similar distinction towards the end of the discussion thread on Learning Theories in cck11 (which I will recap here mainly just so I have it in my own blog for future reference).

When people in the hard sciences see the word “theory”, they expect to see predictions of testable consequences rather than “just” statements of interest or value. If the word “perspective” was used instead, then there would be less indignation at having been “oversold” and more willingness perhaps to engage with the real issues, values, and tools that the connectivist perspective brings to our attention.

The other side of the coin is also relevant. The claim that one has a “theory” about something has the effect of appearing to claim authority for one’s assertions (and also to some extent discouraging the less adventurous from asking too many questions). If at the same time one stretches concepts and words beyond what is familiar this can feel like an attempt at bamboozlement which again can cause people to get frustrated, angry and irrational.

The piece just sings for me. It both realizes and humanizes the subject and opens me up from the dry pseudo-theory that I am often perversely so attracted to.

standards of success:

– fluency with and use of a certain vocabulary

– exposure to and familiarity with a standard body of literature

– conduct of enquiry in a generally accepted form of discourse

– acceptance of an underlying set of principles

then I will have become a groupist (groupie? grouper?) rather than a connectivist.

So I guess I should stop trying to talk the language of networks and connective knowledge, ignore the suggested readings, try to make my discourse less acceptable to a serious audience, and deny the underlying principles of connectivism.

Maybe I’m a better student than I thought!

• One such might be Stephen Downes’ idea that there is special merit in distributed “mesh-like” networks with an essentially bounded number of links connected to each node[1]. The particular virtue suggested by Stephen is that a distributed network may be more resistant to “cascade” phenomena (where I presume he means the rapid spread of an incorrect idea rather than a correct one). One way to make a more precise theory out of this might be to introduce a measurable concept of “gullibility” to quantify the rate of conversion of an individual to a false idea relative to the number if links presenting it (as compared to the rate of conversion to a true idea) and then show (either by experiment or by deduction from previously established principles of network theory[2]) that a “wrong” idea would be less likely to become established in a more distributed network of equally gullible individuals.(Or perhaps just that in the equally distributed case an admixture of less gullible individuals would be more effective in preventing establishment of error – or whatever else turned out to be the case on the basis of rigorous analysis or observation).
• Another is with regard to the circle of ideas referred to by Heli Nurmi with regard to the need or otherwise for leaders or coordinators in order for a network to engage in collective action.[3]
• Any more? (leave them as comments or links and I’ll add them here)

Notes:
[1] – or at least with exponential falloff of the frequency of nodes with increasing connectivity – as opposed to the “power law” frequencies that occur as a result of growth by “preferential attachment” and which often result in the “scale free” property of having network diameter grow very slowly with number of nodes (which may therefore be efficient for networks designed for distribution of information or other goods).
[2] – Note that the practitioners of Network Science don’t refer to their area of study as “Networkism”
[3] – In addition to the cases studied in the SOMA project cited by Heli, other examples of complex collective behaviour arising without coordinators (though perhaps not without leaders) include various covert political resistance groups. On a more primitive level there are bacterial colonies which sometimes develop remarkably complex structures from initially identical member units. And whereas both of the above examples may depend on some kind of long distance signalling, the development of complex patterns in cellular automata (such as Conway’s ‘Game of Life’) happens with just very short range interactions. It would certainly be interesting to find common mathematical principles which related all or just a few of these examples.

…and here’s the cck11 tag.

In fact I think there’s nothing derogatory about it, and regardless of whether or not I am right about their status as scientific theories, I will be very surprised if most people don’t agree that most Learning Theories have at least a significant ideological component – as suggested by their names if nothing else.

After all, an ideology is just a system of related beliefs about values. We all have things we value, and sometimes we find an ideology useful for helping to maintain some sort of consistency in our rankings of them. But our committment to an ideology can be both conditional and flexible. (If it was always absolute then there would be no need for the word “ideologue”.)

One component of my own ideology is a belief in the importance of equity (no Ken not the stock market kind!), and so I tend to prefer approaches which minimize unnecessary inequality of access to resources. (Of course this doesn’t imply expecting strict equality if that would be overall counterproductive, and the question of how much inequality would be inequitable is open to quite a broad range of responses).

With regard to social networking this ideological tendency causes me to see “the rich get richer” phenomenon (which generates the power law) as undesirable and so to prefer a more equal distribution of connections (subject to consistency with the wishes of the participants) as a goal in its own right whenever that does not conflict with other goals.

The question of possible conflict (and of what those other goals might be for a social learning network) is one I cannot yet answer. And it might be a possible target of analysis by some real theory in the connectivist paradigm.