Please, let me come back to the connectivism concept. Since Stephen Downes and George Siemens started their massive on line course titled Connectivism and connective knowledge and started to explain us how the educative process is changing due to this connectivism, a lot of people seem to be interested on it. Maybe that’s why Downes explains on the video below his particulay FAQ about connectivism.
¿Y a cuento de qué necesitamos nosotros otra teoría del conocimiento? Tenemos un montón, y muchas son muy buenas.
Simplemente porque el conectivismo no trata sólo del conocimiento. El conectivismo relaciona el aprendizaje con la tecnología, y trata de las nuevas formas de entender el aprendizaje.
¿Y cómo entiende entonces el conectivismo qué es el conocimiento?
Lo fundamental para entender el conectivismo es comprender que el conocimiento no es una cosa. Las teorías que han tratado el conocimiento hasta ahora están basadas en teorías psicológicas que no son suficientes para entender cómo comprendemos el conocimiento. Simplemente porque el conocimiento no es proposicional. El conocimiento no está compuesto por oraciones, sino por conexiones e interacciones. El conocimiento es, literalmente, la conexión entre entidades: aparece cuando dos entidades se conectan. La teoría conectivista pretende describir cómo se producen estas conexiones y cómo crecen y se desarrollan en la sociedad.
The Tech Museum of California has announced the winners of the 2008 Tech Awards, “an international Awards program that honors innovators from around the world who are applying technology to benefit humanity”.
Under the education category, the winner innovations are:
One of the most interesting topics of the UOC UNESCO Chair Fifth International Seminar is how a community aimed to share and remix teaching materials like Curriki can combine the succes of the project with a creative commons licencse. Curriki will be (probably) presented by Barbara Kurshan on the seminar, but it’s not the only one supporting this idea.
Connexions also works to approach teaching & learning materials to all the educational grades in a free way. To carry out that objetive, they have organized the content on flexible modules that can be re-organized as courses, books, reports, etc. In addition, anyone can both view the content or contribute to the project. Via Microsiervos.
The case will be exposed by Ivan Krstic, specialist in systems architecture and scalability and ex-director of security of MIT One Laptop Per Child project. OLPC is exactly the most famous example of low cost laptops for education, and the most controversial too, but it’s not the only one.
Intel announced Classmate PC last year (the link is in Spanish, sorry), a hard rival for OLPC. The last hit on the market is Spark, a low cost laptop designed by IDEO study for the Inkwell Project defined as “a highly mobile concept device that enables learning anytime, anywhere”.
I prefer being prudent when I speak about this kinds of projects, for not everybody understands how can a company make business (the k-12 is a $ 20 billion market, says IDEO) with the idea of providing cheap usefull tools for students… so I’m looking after to hear Mr. Kristic (as far as I know, pretty much criticl with this projects) as soon as possible…
I am glad to know that I’m not the only curious about “conectivism”. Famous blogger Robin Good has just interviewed George Siemens for Robin Good TV in order to put things clear: What is conectivims?
The result (in the video above, 30 minutes), is one of the most interesting conversations about new paradigms of education
The video is highly recommended for everyone, even though, and just to summarize, here is a firsrt definition of conectivism by George Siemens:
We learn by forming connections with other people: social (face to face), technological. Because knowledge is connected, then learning is the ability to form connections and networks.
The one above is the title of the on line course that right know is being driven by e-Learning pioneers George Siemens and Stephen Downes. The idea of the course, offered through University of Manitoba, is not only to allow enrolled people to use the material, but to allow their access to anyone connected on line.
But let’s go deeper on the course idiosincrasy, for I guess I’m not the only curious about the method. As they explain on the wiki:
This course will be a different type of learning experience. Learners from around the world will be participating, creating an opportunity for peer-to-peer learning and feedback. While facilitators will be active in the conversation, and will provide feedback to the work of students who have enrolled in the course for credit, the number of participants makes it impossible for traditional teacher-centric instruction to work well.
I believe it is a good idea to follow the course, so meanwhile it goes, this post is to be continued…
It’s the most important technological event of the summer, Google has just presented Chrome. Their own web browser, aimed to provide a good service acording to most usual on line habits, in words of the development team: “things that didn’t existe when the first browsers were created”.
It’s very impressive how Google shows its expertise to communicate new products: Chrome has been released with a lot of rumors around, as usual, and the two communication channels they’ve choosen to explain how Chrome works and what is it for are a video and a comic storie. Surprising and effective.
Commoncraft videos are always a success, not only when they make an efford to explain complex phenomenas on plain English because they think it worths it, but also when they produce a video on demand. This is exactly the case of Google, may be one of their biggest client… On this video, Commoncraft explain how to use Google’s RSS tool.
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