#CCK11 Moving beyond Connectivism
Is it time to move beyond connectivism? Has this term outlived its usefulness?
Connectivism seems to incite strong feeling, and it seems to create misunderstandings as to what it represents. And represent it does – much to the chagrin I suppose of its ‘founders’, connectivism is a concept that represents a picture or perspective of a reality, in this case, the reality seen and desired by those very founders.
So what reality is it that they desire? I think it is best expressed in this post:
This post summarizes the position of Stephen Downes in regards to network distribution. His position is that this phenomenon is of low value:
cascade phenomena are generally better represented as the likelihood of the majority of entities in a network entering into a certain state
This ‘certain state’ is likened to an epidemic, an apparent appeal to the emotions to consider cascading as having only a negative effect. In order to reduce this effect, and circumvent the ‘power law’, the suggested remedy is to ‘drown out’ influential voices by increasing the connections in the network, as expressed in this statement:
Cascade phenomena occur, if you will, in a “sweet spot” where there is enough connectivity to permit influence and the propagation of an idea, but not enough connectivity to provide the stabilizing influence of dissenting opinions.
The result of increased connections is:
Communication from other people in the network overwhelms the information that a person might rely upon on his or her own, and that information therefore never informs the group as a whole.
By overwhelming the influential information that a person might rely on, and prohibiting it from reaching a group, we are left with the potential that not all the information reaches the group, due to the ‘drowning out’ of influential voices. The internet needs drowning too:
Thus, while the connected nature of the web demonstrates a lesser tendency to cascade phenomena than the centralized model of mass media, the power law ultimately prevails even in this environment.
The cause of cascade phenomena:
Cascade phenomena, therefore, are caused not simply because a network of connections exists, but because the network that exists is not connected enough.
The goal then, is to create a network that is connected enough so that it ‘drowns out’ influential voices. Maybe this is achievable, but is it desirable? Do the influential voices, that Stephen Downes wants to ‘drown out’, have something of value to convey? One might want to entertain what they have to say, I would think.
Moving beyond connectivism might free up our thinking to find values in the very areas that connectivism would have us discount as influential and therefore undesirable. The connection of influential = undesirable, a connection that is at the root of connectivist ideology, is blinding the work on understanding distributed/distributive networks, and I maintain that we need to remove and move past these blinders. As is well known, most ‘isms are prone to causing schisms, and is it the latter that we desire more of?