Sharism

http://freesouls.cc/essays/07-isaac-mao-sharism.html
Isaac Mao has written an essay "Sharism - A Mind Revolution". His theory is based on neuro-biology and the working of the synapses within the human brain. One of the big questions of our day is whether information should be guarded, copyrighted and sold or accessible to all and freely shared. If you want a web source for the advantages both spiritually and creatively of sharing information, the above link is a good place to begin.
Look around any traditional, hierarchial institution and a major status indicator is who has access to what information. It's an illusion of course because someone somewhere in the world has put it on a website or blogged about it. It's hard to imagine the J. Edgar Hoover's of the world will graciously accept that their secret files aren't secret and the power now lies in sharism. We're more likely to get a return of McCarthyism with the fear of Communism being replaced by the fear of those with unauthorized ways of accessing information.

Facebook

My history on facebook has been being the passive recipient of friend requests. As most of my "friends" are as young as my kids, I'm mainly seeing people using facebook as a way of sharing their photo albums or making party announcements. What other ways is facebook being used? I'd be interested in seeing some facebook pages created by people over 30.
I'm finding facebook useful when trying to locate friends I've lost touch with. Seeing the facebook page reassures people that I'm actually an old classmate of theirs. As most women in my generation have married and changed their last name, googling doesn't work very well. My alumni directory cross-references the women by current and student last name but there's nothing like that available from the college where I studied nursing.
How is facebook useful in your life?

Teachers as Mentors/Coach

In the Connectivism Course I am taking, the discussion today was on power and authority. I came across a couple of things on mentoring in the navy which got me wondering if the net will result in teachers being more mentors/coaches.
http://kmedge.org/2008/06/effective-mentorship-programs.html
http://kmedge.org/2008/09/a-presentation-on-mentoring-in.html
For a few years my husband met weekly with a student studying theology through a distance education program. They were supposed to discuss the readings and make sure the student was staying on track with his work. My husband was also expected to read and discuss the student's papers before they were forwarded on for marking and to proctor the exams. This experience led to opportunities for him to teach Old Testament studies which he loves doing.

CCK08 and NaNoWriMo

The Massive Online Learning Course in Connectivism started out with 2200 learners. If the amount of posting occuring on the web is an indication, participation has noticably slowed down around the half way point. By looking at the number of writers who successfully complete the very popular NaNoWriMo writing challenge of producing a 50,000 word novel in a month, I would like to suggest that the success benchmark for an open massive course should be in the area of 30% for the non-credit, non-paying group. As with the NaNoWriMo, the first group is not a typical group because those who knew about it were already loosely networked. In subsequent years, the people enrolling will less likely be of the same standing in the field. This particular grouping had a lot of Ph.D. candidates and academic designers in it.
If the statistics follow NaNoWriMo, a massive open educational online happening is not a threat to the bricks and mortar schools because the percentage that will actually complete the course will be mainly people who already have an array of skills in their academic tool box.
http://www.nanowrimo.org/
November is NaNoWriMo month. I've provided the url for those of you who feel up to producing a 50,000 word Novel in 30 days.
The number of entrants and the number who actually complete the 50,000 words is growing.
1999: 21 participants and six winners
2000: 140 participants and 29 winners
2001: 5,000 participants and more than 700 winners
2002: 13,500 participants and around 2,100 winners
2003: 25,500 participants and about 3,500 winners
2004: 42,000 participants and just shy of 6,000 winners
2005: 59,000 participants and 9,769 winners
2006: 79,000 participants and 13,000 winners
2007: 101,510 participants and 15,333 winners
If you do the math, the highest percentage of completers were during the first two years - 28.57% and 20.71%. Since then, the percentage of completers has fallen within a narrow range. The lowest was in 2003 with 13.73% completing their novels to a high in 2005 of 16.56%

CCK08 Why Am I Investing the Hours?

Today there was an Elluminate discussion on the logistics of the course.
I've been a houswife for 24 years - so how many letters do I need after my name, and if it triples my salary that's still nothing. And I certainly have no expectations of ongoing contact with course members as I have nothing to offer that would make me part of their network. So why put in all the hours?
When I was 17, a city professor knocked on the door and asked my farmer's-wife mom to help a couple of Masters Degree candidates with their theses on the Baldoon settlement - one was in Geography on drainage and one was in History and involved geneologies. It became her passion for the next 20 years. She became the world's greatest unrecognized expert on the Baldoon settlement. She died at 79 after a 10 year descent into Alzheimers but her bulb had shone brightly before it flickered and dimmed and finally burnt out.
I am putting in the hours for her and for my daugher. God gave my mother a marvellous gift and I don't want that ever forgotten. A university professor she had never met before gave her an opportunity - the only opportunity she ever had to discover and display her intellect. She opened the door for me to leave the farm and go to university and I opened the door wider for my daughter.

CCK08 + Gravitational Community

I think David Pollard should go for a google prize by teaching the rest of us how to create gravitational communities. I've built my google reader randomly through web surfing and google discoveries and it's making me even more of a dilettante. I'm plucking daisys because I cannot psychologically process the blank cheque given after 9/11 to build a culture of fear and suspension of reason. Listening to crowds of people chanting mindless slogans reminds me too much of the evils of world history.

I stumbled across Stephen Downes and David Pollard's blogs but that is going to be increasingly difficult as cyberspace fills up with my type of blog. What spurred me to create a blog was The University of Western Ontario was publishing a new alumni directory and I wanted to be findable by old friends. In the directory women are cross-referenced under both their maiden and married name and that doesn't happen often in life. If anyone wanted to know whatever had happened to Ruth Stewart, I wanted to include a blog address in the directory.

I want to transfer my general interest blog addresses to google notebooks and
use google reader for key people who have great blogs on a particular topic with a classification system for finding other inspirational bloggers on the topic. So how do you find the master librarians of web information? Who cares enough about a particular topic to sort through the massive amount of information out there on any topic and provide some guideposts for the rest of us?

CCK08 Valdis Krebs on Networks

http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=136
This is a very easy to read, concise overview of various types of networks. I thought analyzing the networks on The Simpsons was a brilliant idea because there is no escaping that show. In 1990 there was a guy in one of my kid's classes who had videotaped every episode and had a record of every line Bart had ever written on the blackboard. You could create a spread of contagion map on the number of people who got hooked on the Simpsons through contact with that one mega fan.

I'm not convinced about the book networks and musical style networks. When it comes to the arts, the whole point is to not fall into a rut. Book clubs and reading lists are all about broadening beyond what you'd choose on your own. And how is it possible to not develop some form of appreciation for the favourite style of music of your first and second level family/friends. The requests played at weddings I go to are extremely ecclectic - the party can flow from the funky chicken to a polka to a country and western line dance to beach party music to Irish Rover drinking songs to WWII love ballads to blue grass to current top hits.

Personally I can't wait to go check out the cow at the trough network. Not only does this community have an agricultural college, I also have lots of friends and family in the cattle business. What a novel conversation starter for those annual Christmas gatherings which can get stuck at the cost of production and market price level!

The entertainment industry knows that the suspense of tracking virus outbreaks and terrorist networks creates a suspense-filled production. I think Valdis Krebs network talk is so interesting because we inherently like using networks to make sense of what would otherwise be random and unsolvable threats.

If I were to network my learning style it would be read a blog, go to Wiki for any reference I'm not sure of, go to youtube to check out any music or film mentioned, go to google books to find out about any book I'm unfamiliar with, type the subject into google and pick a link that represents a different opinion and if I think the subject is worth it, I create a heading on google reader for blogs to follow and create a google alert.

CCK08 Movie About Connections

I'll save you the time of watching the movie because it falls into the category "Movies I bought and love with a plot so painfully slow and lacking in action that I am permanently banned from choosing movies for family viewing".

In One True Thing, Ellen (Renee Zellweger) is a young, ambitious New York Journalist. Her father (William Hurt) is a university professor in the process of writing a book who expects his busy important daughter to interrupt her life so he doesn't have to deal with his stay-at-home wife's (Meryl Streep) cancer. Renee is her father's daughter committed to the importance of writing books and articles and gaining tenure and recognition but slowly (and I mean slowly) is taught by mom and her gal pals that a life of doing silly looking things like throwing theme parties and decorating community Christmas trees and cheering up people going through tough times isn't totally shabby. George has his ambition and his affair of the semester but the solid connections were weaved by Katharine.

A faster way to get the message is to think about what we are doing on the connectivity course and compare it to the following webpage with all its 95 links to lists of people's favourite things about autumn http://theinspiredroom.net/2008/09/18/20-little-things-to-treasure-in-autumn-2/ Searching for autumn quotes for the calligraphy group, I stumbled across all this inspiration for not letting the joys of autumn slip passed unnoticed by yourself or your friends. Lots of the inexpensive or free ideas would be even more fun with friends included. There are head connections and heart connections and life requires both.

CCK08 Connectivism & Economic Crisis

While the government is busy stabilizing the banking, insurance, stock market systems, everyone has to figure out how to come out of this situation as stronger and more capable human beings. If we pull together, we could create a much more civil society with the young and the old working together with the youth providing energy and daring and the old providing the collective wisdom of the forefathers and a deep understanding of human needs.

Even the tiniest of Canadian communities has an under-utilized senior's center. Most of those seniors lived through the Great Depression and know the skill sets that got them through it. They also know the community as a whole and how to rally its members.

I know it can work because the Yukon Indians model it every day and they have survived some extremely hard times.

CCK08 - Monique Bégin

I have no way of judging whether Connectivism is a learning theory or not but I suspect that George Siemens and Stephen Downes are beneficiaries of an attitude Monique Begin has fought for over the decades - that we all gain when the doors of possibility widen. Perhaps George and Stephen will only get a moment in the sun but it is a moment with potential to create a further widening in the door. I suspect some people need a map to find Manitoba and may find that alone a hurdle as compared to an idea springing from Oxford or Princeton.

Monique Bégin has worked tirelessly to improve the educational and health possibilities for Canadians who otherwise would have marginalized and streamed into a life of limited possibilities. Before the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, women were either ignored in Canadian textbooks or they were consumers not originators of ideas or they were helpers not leaders. The Royal Commision on Learning confirmed what poor mothers knew all along - that two children of identical intellectual ability were being streamed differently based on the economic status of their parents. A child from a poor family was subtly encouraged to get job skills in high school whereas a better-dressed, more affluent child was more likely to be encouraged to not limit their choices by pursuing less academic courses.

Does anyone know where I can find a collection of Begin's speeches and writings? Search her name on Wiki or try using google search to find a website devoted to her writings. The most obscure performer has a longer writeup. How can someone so outstanding be so obscure? How can someone who has effectively done so much to improve the lives of so many not be more widely known? Her work totally changed my perceptions of myself and totally changed my children's perceptions of their potential as well.

If you don't know who she is, here's the writeup from the World Health Organization.

Dr Monique Bégin is from School of Management, University of Ottawa, Canada. A sociologist, Dr Bégin was the first woman from Québec elected to the House of Commons. Re-elected three times, she was twice appointed Minister of National Health and Welfare. She remains best known for the Canada Health Act 1984. An academic since she left politics, Dr Bégin taught in Women's Studies at Ottawa and Carleton Universities.
Monique Bégin co-chaired the Royal Commission on Learning of Ontario and served on the International Independent Commission on Population and Quality of Life. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she received several honorary doctorates in recognition of her contribution to human rights and to public policies. In 1998, she was invested as Officer of the Order of Canada.

Work Place Design

Every day I receive a google alert on work place design posts. Here's today's top post:
http://www.jameskurtz.com/2008/09/17/my-design-workspace/

I'm so excited because I have a coffee table that I want out of the family room, a dining table I want out of a bedroom and down to the kitchen and the 2 small pieces of furniture currently holding the printer and processor in the spare room. When Peter gets home from school, there's going to be some serious furniture moving around here. Paula will be relieved because I was begging her to make my coffee table look like hers which would require learning and doing some faux marbling technique.

I've read that the sheet of stuff you use when creating a shower wall makes a super economical whiteboard. Any ideas on how to hang the thing? I'm thinking maybe I'll have to get one of my kids to make a frame. If you've tried this project, tell me if it actually does make a good whiteboard.

Response to World Run by Buffs

http://lisahistory.edublogs.org/2008/09/18/a-world-run-by-buffs/
This is a thought-provoking article on being a history buff vs being a fully developed historian and whether or not buffs have anything worthwhile to contribute to well-established academic disciplines.
Some of the bloggers I follow are Princeton theological students. I read them mainly because I can. It's amazing to me that someone in a small rural parish can have access to theological studies being conducted in Princeton. I admire their brilliance and discipline and youth. That said, I also think it's a lot of counting how many angels can dance on the head of a pin - interesting but not essential to the day-to-day survival of the church.
Canon law is a much more compelling read. Every time a Bishop in the United States is denied due process under Canon law I practically have a heart attack. The job security yardstick used to be: Was a civil law broken? Was a canon law broken? Obedience to civil and Canon law was the life jacket. k
Most of us live life in the trenches. We crawl through the mud, get shelled, suffer post traumatic stress syndrome, see our comrades fall, maybe take a hill today, be ordered to retreat tomorrow and be sent back the next day to reclaim the same minor hill. An academic researcher can give a brilliant analysis, gain a Ph.D. and become the CNN expert commentator but to truly be the expert you have to get some field experience.
Theory is elegant and practice is a bloody mess. Education does not adequately prepare anyone for life - it does give one a much wider assortment of tools and a list of standardized best practices which will have their usefulness.

CCK08 Need How To Information

1. I would really appreciate it if I could sort out the postings by having more tagging provided. If members of the group have created a how-to video or have posted a visual analysis of data or found something particularly relevant, I want to create a google alert for those postings by using CCK08 plus a topic category. Perhaps someone is already doing this and I just haven't found the particular email that would point me to the sorted information.

2. Before the course, going through google reader was my favourite computer activity. There must be a way to only have the Connectivism bloggers separated from my general interest bloggers similar to the explanation for separating the connectivism gmail from the regular gmail box. Would someone please direct me to the post explaining how to do this with the blogs entered into google reader? At the moment, I have a header for "Connectivism" and one for "Course Work" but it would be better to have them separated from the other 25 topics of importance to me.

Reflections on Participatory Culture article

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture (.pdf)
This article assumes that kids should start off running in the 21st Century in order to be on track for creating excellent web input and maybe having that multi-million dollar great idea by 14. So now I'm going to lose all credibility by telling you why I'm not totally convinced.

Our family has received 4 phone calls from Bishops in our lives saying something like, "We've prayed to the Holy Spirt and we believe that God is calling you to go to __________ and we go. I believe God has a special place in his heart for clergy kids and when we are called to go somewhere, I believe that the move is part of God's developmental plan for my children.

God has never called us to the Silicon Valley. It would appear that the plan was to take the kids through the history of civilization. We live in rectories so with all the moves we lived in the older section of the community with the church being the closest building to our house

Our first posting was to a small (pop 450) village in the Yukon where the dominant culture was Southern Tutchone. We left when the oldest was in Grade 2 but he had already learned through school how to jig for salmon, snare a rabbit, ride a horse, ride in a dog sled, recognize animal tracks, etc., etc.

Our second posting was to a small town where the dominate culture was Scottish Presbyterian (almost identical to my birth community). There my kids learned frugality, that adults make the rules, that someone sees whatever you are doing and out of love and friendship will phone your mom because character matters. It was during this period that our oldest turned 12 and began sea cadets resulting in all of our children going through either sea or army cadets. The military data base recognizes our names and CSIS has checked us out.

Our third posting was to a community near the Windsor/Detroit border. We lived across the street from a Sikh temple, the Macedonian Orthodox Church and down the road from the Muslim school. It was here that the boys all got jobs working on a beef farm and studied either auto body or auto mechanics and bought an assortment of vehicles older than themselves to fix. It's also a place of home do-it-yourselfers so now two of my kids have bought a house this year and a third is looking for his fixer-upper first house.

Our fourth posting was to a small community with an agricultural college and a declining population and economy. Because of the economic situation, my husband works in 6 churches in 6 communities. The move emptied the nest and gave the kids time and space to make their own good decisions about the direction they would like to take in life. Eventually one son returned and discovered that there are opportunites here and he has been mentored and befriended by the men in the community. If he hadn't moved here, he never would have discovered that he likes studying accounting at least as much as writing screenplays.

While the article could be right about starting off running in 21st Century culture, it's not a bad thing to have a wide range of survival skills just in case the world gets unplugged or fortunes fall in the computer industry.

Blogging Strategy for Connectivism

So what does someone like me, an emptying nest mom, blog about connectivism - a course with 1900 students - many of who have Ph.D.'s and many articles published on various aspects of educational design? Obviously what I have to say is pretty useless to the other members of this course who are way out of my league. So here is what I decided. I'm going to post about the things I am learning that a woman over 50 in rural or small town Ontario might find useful or adaptable to her lifestyle.

Introductory Week Thoughts

Having studied neither technology nor education, I'm looking for my niche in this course.
My plan is to create 2 weekly posts. One will be tagged CCK08 with the aim of providing data on how I'm doing for those people doing research projects on the success of this learning model. The other will be directed towards people who stumble across my blog and might be interested in what I'm doing without being interested in the commitment required when auditing a class.
Rather than rushing through the introductions, I'm going through them slowly following blog links and going to Wikipedia and making sure that I understand any terms or theories I am unsure of. I am also trying to turn this sea of names into an identifiable learning community. Being a bit on the shy side, it will potentially be easier to learn names and get a sense of the actual people in this massive online course as opposed to actually being in a large introductory course lecture hall?
Because I am starting pretty much at square one, even if I have difficulty keeping up with the actual course content, there is potential for developing a broad ground level knowledge - something similar to taking a pre-admission course or a general arts course.