Education, Networks, and Informatics

Two years ago we talked about tools. We heard educational bloggers say: wikis, blogs, podcasts, and flickr. With these things we will change the world.

Last year we talked about pedagogy. We wanted to re-learn how to teach. We talked about empowerment, about lesson design, and about international projects. We learned how to change our own worlds.

This year, we need to talk about networks. The topic has come up as we learned about personal learning networks (PLNs), about using RSS in classrooms, and about establishing projects that involved students from places around the globe. But this year we need to go far beyond this and learn about the theories behind how networks develop, expand, are strengthened, and die. We need to learn about informatics, about information aesthetics, information science, and viral movement.

If we can agree that learning is best accomplished as a collective effort, and not as the individual accomplishment of building an unconnected repertoire of discrete facts; our learning about how teaching and learning is best accomplished must broaden beyond the domains traditionally associated with education. We must broaden our research and our understanding in to new fields.

How can we help students to become accomplished and trusted nodes in a network of learners? How can we help "good" information to spread quickly throughout a network, while slowing or purging information that is untrue or unwanted? Who gets to decide what is unwanted? Do we have tools to track the movement of ideas across nodes and the interconnected networks of classrooms? If we want information to move or spread, how do we best accomplish that? Are some nodes more important in the spread of ideas than others? How do we measure that? How do we strengthen weak nodes?

Eight questions to begin with and far too many more to follow.

technorati tags:learning, informatics, classroom, pln, karl, fisch, clay, burrell

Comments

[Barbara]

Clarence,
You have had some great blog posts lately. This is a very interesting look at the way the conversation has been developing and I think you are right. Your questions deserve some real attention but I am not sure I am ready to tackle them. i hope what we are doing this year will help develop some of the answers.
From an administrative perspective the whole issue of PLN for the staff is taking on new levels of meaning. In the beginning I was looking to get everybody reading blogs in the edublogosphere. That is still part of the strategy but it is also time to start exploring subject specific sources of information. Maybe this is obvious but like it or not change/learning is incremental and the movement to have education embrace digital sources as key components of knowledge takes some deliberate, modeling, experiences, and planning.

[Kelly Christopherson]

Clarence, as usual you get below the surface to challenge us at a deep level than many of us want to go. Networks are a key in what we do and how education will evolve. Many educators are still working in the single classroom network model while many of those who have escaped are still unsure of what a PLN is or how it might apply to what it is that they are doing. For a select few, there is the understanding that PLN's are indeed foundational material that will need to be developed. My concern is that all these forces will take their toll on educational systems and educators. Sometimes we need to go slow to go fast. I, too, have similar questions about PLN's but in order to have a conversation about them, I first need to bring the staff with which I work out from the single classroom network. In this case, going slow may indeed allow us to go fast.