Frances Bell’s Blog

I am pondering if and how I can connect to CCK09, this year’s run of the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge online course.  My reflections are based on my participation in CCK08, reading George Siemens’ post, and listening to the recording of a session with Downes and Siemens here.

I am still asking myself the question I raised in November last year. Is Connectivism a Learning network?  George’s post and some of the discussion in the Elluminate recording are encouraging, as they highlight the links between connectivism and pre-existing theories and concepts.  They also suggest that it’s ‘OK’ to interpret connectivism differently, since George Siemens and Stephen Downes seem to, for example in discussing their differences in last night’s recording.

What about the links to practice, though?  From my participation in CCK08, I found strong evidence of teachers being inspired by connectivism to apply some of its ideas to their own practice and some examples of how that worked out.  What I haven’t seen is any systematic, rich study of the use of connectivism in practice - please point it out to me if it exists.  I have been thinking and writing about connectivism since last year (not all published yet) and I realised that  I couldn’t undertake a systematic study of the CCK08 course (because of lack of time) but I do think that connectivism needs to be studied in use.  Stephen Downes’ contributions to connectivism may be amenable to advancement by philosophising and argument but this, I would humbly suggest, is their limitation - a normative approach to network as a mode of organisation, and a lack of grounding in practice.  On the other hand, George Siemens’ more pragmatic approach is inclusive of a broad range of theories and concepts, and encourages the interpretation of connectivism in practice.

So, what next for connectivism? Will it be taken up by practitioners and used in an ad hoc manner, without rigorous evaluation? If so, I think its impact may be limited and it may not develop and evolve.  Will it develop by ‘talk’ alone?  I am sure that CCK08 and CCK09 help to develop connectivism as well to disseminate it but without evaluation they cannot maximise learning from practice in such a way as to hone the theory.

My little hope is that a significant funded research project can be undertaken to provide theory-guided (my preference would be for Activity Theory and/ or Actor Network Theory) rich descriptions of connectivism-informed interventions in formal and informal learning situations. My thinking about this in the last year has been influenced by Carl Spinuzzi’s work, written up in his book.  Any funders out there?  I , for one, would love to do the study.