Social Dynamics and social tinkering

Howard Rheingold was today speaking to the a group of researchers and lecturers of the Open University of Catalonia. The round table organized by the Unesco Chair in E-learning was very crowded and participants were really excited with the speaker and the topic of discussion.
Online Social Networks and elearning are part of the issues that interest most researchers here. Thus the discussion that followed the phantastic presentatoon of Howard Rheingold, had excellent contributions.
I had the impression that there was a consensus in the importance to convince students that social networks jean an oppprtinity to learn in a cooperative way and further to construct knowledge collectively. My questions pointed on the vision of the professor as a leader that works the dynamics of the group to make possible that each student reaches the expected level of knowledge.
However I  also agree with Howard Rheingold, as hi stated in his presentation, that our short experience in teaching through online social network tools suggests that we should incorporate some of the principles of social capital. I also believe that we should teach students to tinker in social networking. Students are often confused in adopting these new means. On the other side, many young students (sometimes called “Digital Natives”) are experts in using the Internet to cooperate and these are the users of these social networks for learning.

Replicating spaces for knowledge

Last week I visited the building by Herzog & De Meuron: Caixaforum in Madrid. OT is an excellent Art center close to the Prado managed by the big savings bank La Caixa. These architects have built several wonderful Art centers in famous cities like San Francisco, Barcelona and Madrid.

In these recent years there sound voices claming the presence of more personal identity in public buildings and asking local authorities to contract rather local architects than famous international ones. These critical voices of the international constructive style argue that most buildings appear as replications and cities look all the same.

As an observer of these architectural networks, I feel that spaces belong people once they’re built. And people are different in every city.

Art centers look more similar due to the way exhibitions are designed than because of the buildings that are hosting them.

Today people have the power to transform any space through the usage. In an abstract representation spaces, art, people, time, and buildings knitt a network of knowledge where the architect is the less important element. Though the style becomes a bridge between cultures and gathers virtual links through triggering sensations of common art spaces.

Connectivism. A new learning paradigm

This last weak, the first of the Connectivism and connected Knowledge ’08 course has been my first contact to this theory, that has raised so many different points of view among the almost 2,000 participants to the course, that it has been really hard to get an overview.

Fortunately, George Siemens and Steven Dones have been very good in coordinating everything and I finally got the impression I have been able to get most of what was relevant . I’d like to thank both for making connectivism so accessible.

The tools where new, tha way people got involved was new, and the dynamics inside the course are new, so that the learning process through practice is probably the best experience to test onself the viability of this theory.

Even if connectivism was new for me as a theory, my personal experience in e-learning, as student, first, and as lecturer, later, revelaed many of the fundamental beliefs of Connectivism so that the statements in the papers I read this week were not completely new to me. The importance of the network in the way knowledge is generated and distributed inside the network was clear to me from the very beginning when I follwed the first e-learning course with Web-CT in 1996.

What the readings of this week have basically given to me is the theoretical construct of Connectivism and the links to other theories in psychopedagogy but also in sociology.

In the last two years I’ve been working with Social Network Analysis, trying to understand the weight of Social Capital in creating knowledge inside organizations and networks. The role of weak ties and the bridging strategies in social networks have specially attracted my interest and I’ve done some empyrical research with on-line and off-line networks in this regard. Strong ties and bonding role as vlaues for cohesion was evident  though what I was trying to understand were the dynamics that could transform knowledge as a trigger for innovation. Thus I needed to look after knowldge generation in a cooperative way.

Barry Wellman’s paper Little Boxes, Glocalization and Networked Individualism has also brought much more undesrtanding of the multilevel and multitheoretical approach in understanding Connectivism. This is also the point tha Monge and Contractor raise in their Book Theory of Communication Networks. So I feel I should go on further and deeper in this path.

It has been a very intense and rewarding week. I hope I can share more reflections in the coming weeks.