Categoria: connectivism 08

CCK09: Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Course 2008

Let’s try to grow the AIMN09 blogroom (CCK08)

I’m familiar with very large and reach blogrooms were I teach computer literacy in an almost asinchronous way but these blogrooms were all started with a couple of conventional lectures. That is, I enter in a classroom and transform it in a blogroom, sometimes a set of classrooms in a blogroom.

In the AIMN09, an experimental course on WEB 2 at the italian Congress of Nuclear Medicine that will be held in Firenze in March 2009, is different because people are supposed to get involved directly from the Web starting with an email and not with a live discussion. Moreover, they are not students but professionals, so they have little time.  Moreover they are invited to begin the course 6 months before the congress.

Well, it is an experiment. The total community amounts to about 1200 pepople. The first email was sent at the beginning of September. We have 7 inscriptions, so far.

This post (and perhaps some next ones) is visible both to the CCK08 and the AIMN09 communities. This is an experiment too. In October a standard blogroom will join.

Thus, dear AIMN09 participants, I have just added a growing path (Il percorso in divenire) section in our wiki.

Please go to the first hint to grow your path …

CCK08: let’s go for a walk in a wood and relax …

It seems, perhaps not surprisingly, that many appear to be puzzled and sometimes annoyed by the chaotic structure of the course, even some of my italian classmates of the LTEver community.

Well, let’so go for a walk in a wood and relax …

What does it mean to know a wood?

  • to know its name?
  • to know the region where it is located?
  • to know all the paths in the wood so as to be able to find the way back from any place and in any condition?
  • to know the kinds of trees, plants and animals that are populating it?
  • to know it so that you can hunt wild animals there?
  • to know that in a certain place there is water flowing under the soil?
  • to know where and when one can find good mushrooms there?
  • to know a relevant historical fact that took place there?
  • to know that a famous poet found inspiration there?
  • to know it because you felt in love there?

Oh, there are so many ways to know that wood, some of them achieved in an entire life and some in very short times.

However, nobody would assume that in order to know that wood one has to know exactly every tree, one by one, its shape, age and location. Every plant. Every leave of every plant. Every animal and where every animal is and what every animal is doing at any instant. Every stone. Every particle.

Of course not! It is just too much and after all, would this kind of knowledge be desirable? No, this thorough and crazy knowledge appears to be less desirable than one of the previous ones.

No, what we need is to find our own way to know that wood. There are unlimited ways to now it and everyone has a different system (network?) of concepts to connect to it. Even the same person at different times has a different system of concepts to connect to it.

At any rate, which is the best way to achieve that peculiar knowledge? Just enjoing a walk in the wood, one, two, many times and go where you see something you like. With the passing of time you will know that wood in your own way.

So, let’s go far a walk in this course and relax …

CCK08: Does Learning Grow or Is it Built?

The vision proposed by Stephen Downes …

Hence, in connectivism, there is no real concept of transferring knowledge, making knowledge, or building knowledge. Rather, the activities we undertake when we conduct practices in order to learn are more like growing or developing ourselves and our society in certain (connected) ways.

In What Connectivism Is

and by George Siemens

Connections create meaning

in What is connectivism

explain all my learning experience. Just an example.

As a students in Physics I got A in a course based on the Fourier Transform, a basic, wonderful and ubiquitous mathematical instrument.

Later on, when working on my thesis I was glad to see that the Fourier Transform was needed to work with digital medical images: “Finally, I can use something of that I have studied!” I thought.

It was a shock when I discovered that the (scholastic) knowledge of the theorems and the related demonstrations, of the Fourier Transform was almost useless: I missed completely the basic concept.

Successively, I realized that I missed a lot of connections and that without those connections the idea of Fourier Transform (together with the theorems and the demonstrations) was just an asteroid lost in the space of all the possibilities.

I missed even the more general concept of mathematical transformation.

I missed the essence of mathematics, despite my former good grades.

Probably, from my teachers point of view, knowledge of the Fourier Transform was successfully transferred in my mind but in my later experience I began to realize its essence and usefulness only when trying to find connections in a real context in order to solve a real problem that I strived to solve. I began to feel comprehension just waiting in face of my problem and letting connections come out, spontaneously. This part of my understanding was absolutely spontaneous, it had to grow. It took time.

Afterwards, I was able to look at this mathematical device as at a wonderful toy useful to describe an incredible number of phenomena. I was also able to see the beauty of symmetries and how the perception of such symmetries were useful to find other new connections.

The propositional knowledge of the Fourier Transform is partial and by no ways sufficient to use it in real life. A more effective knowledge, and a never thorough one, needs a system of connections with other concepts, some abstract and some real, and this system of connections can obly grow in your mind because you have to experience it.

CCK08: trying to understand what I’m doing

CCK08: The Connectivism & Connective Knowledge course

With this post I introduce myself in the Connectivism & Connective Knowledge course.

I live in Firenze, Italy, where I teach mainly computer literacy in various curricula of the Medical School in the University of Florence.

Very interested in this course because I realized a posteriori that what I was trying to do with my students during the last years suits very well in the connectivistic thought. Really excited when I discovered it.

The existence of this course itself is a success, in my view, since I feel somewhat culturally sustained in my teaching experiments. Moreover, I already found useful readings for next teaching activities. It is a wonderful opportunity to exchange ideas on similar experiments.

I would like to mix the participation to the connectivism course with my teaching activities.

Eight years ago I was put in face of 700 students per year, unequally spread in 2 semesters, about 25 classes in 6 different places within 100 Kilometers … they were of the first year of various curricula at the Medical School of Medicine, medicine, odontoiatry, nursing, physiotherapy and so on … I was supposed to teach basic informatics, computer literacy plus something else, more or less specific to the curricula …

First panic, then reflection, then a basic thought: if something appears to be very frightening may be it becomes a blessing when you change perspective … 700 girls and boys per year to talk to may represent a wonderful opportunity …

I started by using some Learning Management Systems to support a conventional series of lectures. Then, by means of successive innovations, now all my students are together in a blogroom, the chair is this blog (blog studenti), contents are coauthored in a wiki, the old rigid succession of lessons are now substituted by an initial lessons to introduce the method and by some very focused seminars, students are encouraged to seek what they need autonomously, to help each other, to connect with others in the blogroom and outside.

Since 2000, a student population of about 5000 students was involved. In the final surveys, the methodology received about 90

In the semester beginning in October there will be some 200 new students in this blogroom.

Now I’m involved in a new experimental course on WEB 2 at the italian Congress of Nuclear Medicine that will be held in Firenze in March 2009.

The idea is to attract professionals of Italian community of Nuclear Medicine in learning to use and using WEB 2.0 to cooperate, to search for Open Educational Resources and to discuss them. The experiment is amusing but it could be a failure because involving twenty year students or a community of professionals are different things. It is also difficult because it is not possible to use a first lecture to involve people. I tried to propose a half serious video to attract people. Here you have a subtitled version of this video …

Web 2.0 for the congress of Nuclear Medicine

Dear reader, this is a welcome post for potential students of the WEB 2.0 refresher course related to the Italian National Congress of Nuclear Medicine that will be held in Firenze in March 2009.

You are probably wondering why it is written in english. The reason is that I’ll try to participate to the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course and I would like to share this experience with my “classmates” and my facilitators, George Siemens and Stephen Downes.

Actually, I don’t know if I will be able to write the post both in english and in italian, we’ll see.

As far as your participation is concerned, well, go back to the wiki and go on on reading carefully.

For now, please notice that this post is placed in the category aimn09; in future all the posts related to this WEB 2.0 course will be in the aimn09 category. If you want to see only those posts, just click on the aimn09 link in the section Categorie of the column at the right. Just try …

Commentaries to the course

Four students provided a translation in english of their commentaries to the course, so far.

They have been published in this wiki page.

On help again …

First of all, thanks to the students who put some translations in the feedback page.

I appreciated what Caterina said

La traduzione è qui, se qualcuno vuol correggere è il benvenuto

because she caught the true idea of wiki cooperation.

Therefore, try to improve the text as a collective work: you are supposed to correct errors or improve syntax also in text written by others. If an original author finds that a correction damages what she or he intended to communicate, a constructive discussion can be started.

It is interesting to remark that the idea of scrittura collettiva is not quite a new one. In the sixties Don Milani let work together its kids with pieces of paper and pencil (doc) …

Students of 07/08: anyone willing to give me a help?

To recap my last two posts with some further specifications.

As I wrote about this course in a short description of our wiki in the Educational-College/University section of the Public PBwiki Directory:

A computer literacy course shifted towards the use of WEB 2.0 tools for learning to communicate, share and co-operate. The course is offered to the students of the medical school in the Florence University, Italy. Seminars, teacher’s liquid presence, blogclass and wiki are basic elements of the course.

Feeling that the inspiration of the course resonates much with the connectivistic thought, I’m willing to join our experiences with the next Connectivism and Connective Knowledge in fall 2008.

Probably I will not be able to manage all the assignments but this is not the point. My participation is about letting known interested people about our experience and, above all, it’s about getting valuable feedback to improve the course further.

Unfortunately, language is a major obstacle: our blogclass cannot be so transparent to english-speaking people as we would need. Therefore, any idea to overcome the problem is wellcome.

To start with, we begin translating some feedback got from the students of the spring 2008 course. Some of them have already offered their help, therefore, I set up a wiki page to collect the translated or newly composed pieces.

To my students I would suggest

  • feel free to translate your original piece as it is or even to broaden it as you like
  • feel free to translate the text of other students
  • in both cases, please place a note in the wiki page when you start to work on a piece so that other know that a translation is going on that piece
  • may be someone could translate my blog pages Come e Perché?

Ragazzi, c’è qualcuno che mi può dare una mano?

Nel post precedente ho spiegato che lo scoglio principale nel connettere la blogoclasse al corso Connectivism and Connective Knowledge sarà linquistico: come rendere trasparente la blogoclasse al resto del mondo che non parla italiano.

Un’idea per mitigare il problema può essere quella di anticipare la connessione mediante alcuni post che siano visibili ai facilitatori del corso.

Ebbene, c’è qualcuno di voi studenti, oramai veterani della blogoclasse, che può aiutarmi scrivendo nel proprio blog un post con una versione in inglese delle opinioni sul corso?