Connectivism: A new pedagogy for the 21st century?
In this blog I would like to pick up on an interesting point made by both Heba Elsayed and Simon Hardaker about using Open Education Resources (OER). In particular, they both comment on the unsuitability of individual OER for use in teaching outside of the context for which they were designed, which makes these resources unsuitable for a pick ‘n mix approach to course development. Similar to Heba, I also don’t rely on textbooks in my courses. Not because of the costs for the students of buying textbooks, but simply because I haven’t found any textbooks that offer exactly what I want to teach in my courses and how I want to teach it. Take for example a course on social media that I used to teach for several years until 2016–2017 in the Business School. Textbooks on social media treat the subject either from media/critical studies and social theory perspectives, or they focus on social media marketing. The first kind does not agree with my mainly positivist/systems approach to social media studies, while the latter kind is too narrow in scope. Instead I rely on using academic papers and book chapters, plus various Web sources and Youtube videos, which generally can be used through the Copyright Licencing Agency (CLA) licence and other licences. My use of material with a free to use Creative Commons (CC) licence has, so far, been limited, however.
Having caught my attention, I started looking for some more information about OER and their use by teachers in the development of their courses. This search led me to an article by Hogan, Carlson and Kirk presented at the Open Education Global Consortium Conference in 2015 in which they contrast OER with Open Educational Practices (OEP). According to these authors, OEP is about embracing OER in a radically new educational model which aims to develop students into “networked learners who can self-organize, co-create, innovate, and peervalidate.” The currently dominant new educational model that fits this description is connectivism. According to this model of education, the responsibility for organising, connecting and giving meaning to diverse sources of information lies with learners in interaction with other learners and tutors in learning communities. The role of the tutors is to “create learning ecologies, shape communities, and release learners into the environment.” So, in the context of OEP, the issue is not just that individual OER are not easily taken out of context in a pick ‘n mix approach to course development, course development itself becomes a self-defeating activity because it takes away the impetus from students to interact with those OER.
“What we know is less important than our capacity to continue to learn more. The connections we make (between individual specialized communities/bodies of knowledge) ensure that we remain current. These connections determine knowledge flow and continual learning.”
Siemens — Learning Ecology, Communities, and Networks — Extending the classroom
It is not about whether or not technology is used in the creation of the learning environment either. This is easily illustrated by contrasting xMOOCs with cMOOCs, which both rely entirely on technology but adopt very different teaching models. xMOOC stands for eXtended Massive Open Online Course. xMOOCs are essentially traditional distance learning courses made up of instructor designed learning materials and activities. They are open in the sense that they are accessible for free by anyone with an Internet connection, and may occasionally contain OER which can be used by learners as permitted by Creative Commons licences. However, learning is tutor led, and the platforms allow limited connectivity with other learners and external learning materials (beyond simple links). cMOOCs, in contrast, adopt a very different, learner centred, approach. The ‘c’ stands for ‘connectivist’. cMOOCs are aimed at nurturing the learning ecologies central to the connectivist model of education. These ecologies can be distributed across a number of platforms and social media, and rely heavily on material contributed by learners. The role of instructors in cMOOCs is much like that of a gardener in gardening; to till the soil (create a safe environment), sow the seeds (bootstrap learning by providing links to relevant OER), suppress the weeds (make sure learners are critical but supportive) and provide guidance where necessary (gently guide the community to prevent going around in circles). cMOOCs are more open than xMOOCs in the sense that they offer learners a lot more freedom and do away with the strict hierarchy between tutors and learners.
So, what constitutes and OER in the context of OEP? Geoff Cain talks about Concept Maps as OER that typify the ideas underlying connectivism. A Concept Map is a diagram that depicts relationships between concepts. Jen Techlearning used Pindex to create a mood-board in her exploration of what OER are and shared it with her classmates, thus creating an OER about OER. The OER-Commons provides tools for building OER such as the Resource Builder which allows anyone to create a multimedia Web resource using a simple editor. And then, of course, there is Wikipedia, the ultimate OER. Thus it appears that a move to OEP would stimulate the creation of OER that are truly open in the sense that they can be used and repurposed by different learning communities. This would open up a global arena for learning, in which communities can connect, share and interact, liberating learning from the confines of institutional boundaries.
This may all sound very 21st century, but in essence none of what I have said about OEP goes beyond the affordances offered by Web 2.0 technology and what many people are doing on the Web anyway. Take the idea of an Internet meme as an idea that is shared, modified, combined and redistributed in communities of millions of people. Take open source software development on Github by communities of practice coordinating the co-creation and evolution of software artefacts. Thus it may appear that connectivism simply reflects the reality of how we live and work as an adaptation to the digital age, and offers very little new insight into how we learn. This, however, is not necessarily the case. For example, “[previous] theories do not address learning that occurs outside of people (i.e. learning that is stored and manipulated by technology), as Siemens puts it. Unfortunately, Siemens’ explanations of how connectivism accounts for learning that occurs outside of people are rather vague and woolly. Is he suggesting that we need to make a distinction between learning in the head and learning in the world?
The idea that we need to make a distinction between learning in the head and learning in the world is, of course, not new either, and certainly not unique to connectivism. The field of distributed cognition in psychology has pondered for more than three decades how learning occurs at the interface between knowledge in the head and knowledge in the world. In particular, some scholars in this field have suggested that learning in the head is adaptive to the characteristics of the learning environment (knowledge in the world and how easily it is accessible) and the demands of the task. For example, consider how having easy access to knowledge in the world may affect our memory for information. When people were asked to read information on which they were unexpectedly tested later, they tended to remember more of the information if they were told at the time of reading that they would not be able to access it later compared to people who were told that the information would be available to them throughout. The latter tended to remember where to access relevant information rather than the actual information itself. This clearly shows that having knowledge in the world affects the knowledge we hold in our heads. Siemens asserts that learning is, literally, the creation of connections in a network. However, it is unclear what this means exactly and I would therefore assert instead that learning is the process of becoming familiar with the topology of a knowledge network and realizing its importance in relation to specific tasks and objectives. In other words, it is the internalisation of the network (topology), not the network itself, which constitutes learning.
We need to be mindful that our cognition has always been adaptive to the availability of external knowledge. Think of how we have used simple knowledge artefacts like shopping lists for millennia. However, with the almost infinite amplification of the amount of external knowledge available to us now, what we need is a pedagogy that takes into account changes in the way we access, use and create this external knowledge and focuses on the core abilities underlying these activities. In addition, we need to make students aware of and teach them how to respond to the vagaries of modern technology in order to ensure an enduring high quality of learning. Finally, we need to rethink the methods we use to assess our learners.
This brings me back to Hogan, Carlson and Kirk who, in their discussion of educational practice for the digital age, cite a paper by Reeves, Herrington and Oliver which lists the 10 criteria to consider in the projects selected to promote learning (see side box). In my view, the one thing that combines all of these criteria is the need to engage students in dialogue. The importance of dialogue for learning is perhaps most explicit in Robin Alexander’s Dialogic Teaching model. Alexander, and other advocates of dialogic teaching, draw upon evidence suggesting that dialogue and, in particular, argumentation “promote high-level thinking and intellectual development through their capacity to involve teachers and learners in joint acts of meaning-making and knowledge construction.” This emphasis on the importance of dialogue and argumentation is, again, not new and goes back, at least, to the Socratic method of teaching which started several millennia ago. However, the renewed interest may signal the realisation that in the age of social media and social networks developing our students’ abilities to engage in dialogical argumentation and critical thinking should be priority number one.
Perhaps not coincidentally, a pedagogy based on dialogue can also work as a model for OEP. Stimulating dialogue removes the distinction between tutors and learners. In the act of dialogical argumentation, learners are compelled to look for knowledge in the form of OER to back up their arguments. The learning that takes place during dialogue results in the modification, repurposing and connecting of OER which in turn are shared and stimulate more dialogue. The need to self-organise, co-create, innovate and peer-validate become self-evident. Networking becomes a way of expanding horizons and gaining advantages associated with innovation that arises from connecting diverse communities. This dialogue can also easily transcend institutional boundaries, bringing together learning communities on a global scale.
Of course there are risks. Learners will have to be encouraged to constructively engage with arguments that challenge their way of thinking rather than seek continual confirmation and approval. They also need to be able to rise above the low standards set by much of today’s social media discourse. However, I have seen clear signs in my interaction with students over recent years that the old hierarchical, tutor led, way of teaching is no longer adequate in meeting the very different expectations modern students have compared to those a decade ago. It is no longer sufficient to explain things to them and expect them to absorb the information. If there is no requirement for them to do something meaningful with the things we teach them they will question why they have to sit for hours in a lecture room if they could have used that time more productively online. Academics complain that attendance at lectures is low and that students appear to be disinterested even if they do attend (paying more attention to their mobile phones than to what the lecturer has to say). Is this because they are lazy and stupid, or could this be because they are so used to engaging with knowledge at the point where they need it that they find it hard engage with knowledge when this immediate need is not there. I think the latter is more likely.
So what is the answer? Flipped classrooms are definitely a good idea, as they encourage dialogue, but they are not as open as online dialogue for the reasons explained above. Should tutor presence therefore be confined to electronic environments? Not necessarily so. Take, for example, my social media course. The aims of this course were to let students experience and explore how the networks we are part of, our positions within those networks and the tools we use to interact with those networks impact how we live our lives, work and do business. For their coursework students were instructed to write a blog. I deliberately did not provide detailed instructions for its content, nor did I provide a rubric for how it would be assessed in order to avoid the risk of creating a double bind. I did, however, have weekly small group seminars in order to be able to give learners guidance, feedback and encouragement. As I was not entirely confident that students’ ability for dialogical learning and reasoning was well enough developed I also provided some instruction and practice into how the construct and analyse an argument. I also built in peer-evaluation.
Reflecting on the experience, I don’t think I found all the answers to the question how to deliver a connectivist curriculum, but it may have been a step in the right direction. As with any complex problem, the answers will necessarily have to be complex and multi-faceted. Societal and institutional sensitivities need to be taken into account, any solution will have to be part of a wider set of actions not aimed just at HE, but starting at primary school level. In that respect I was encouraged to read about the inclusion of general capabilities in the Australian primary school curriculum which includes requirements to develop critical and creative thinking and personal and social capabilities. We cannot turn a blind eye to the opportunities 21st century technology offers for OEP and life-long learning. The road to implementing a pedagogical model for OEP that is dialogical in nature will be long and winding, having to negate the forces that will be trying to push us off it, but the stakes are too high not to take that direction.
