Hi everyone,
As I was reading Twitter yesterday George Siemens had posted that he had presented on Connectivism and Instructional Design and it was not well received. I had to look! I printed and have reflected on the following slide from that presentation and would love to put it up here for comments and consideration......(with a HUGE caveat that this is only one slide, out of context and not probably one that was intended to engender this level of focus).
He points to three tension points: finding quality content, creating a pathway through it as we learn and fostering connections between teachers and learners. If our larger educational context moves more to the world without courses that he imagines, then I agree with his tension points- in ascending order as they are listed. For now the online universities that I work for largely manage all three of these tensions for our doctoral students (for which they receive hefty fees largely supported by student loans). This brings to mind questions of the transitioning of our world economies and whether and to what extent personal debt will continue to finance our institutions, but that is a subject for another post.
What interests me today, and links with my earlier post about doctorate life's rite of passage into peer-dom within academia, is that reputation is linked to "sustained participation in a learning network (ie the distributed world that evolves out of ideas that interest us). I want to unpack the idea of reputation using his three columns and adding another one: Educational Practice. Maybe he just didn't have room to put reputation in all three columns, but to me that is where it belongs.
First and foremost (at least in academia) we are responsible to and for the quality of our ideas. Using George Siemens as an example, I follow him on Twitter, his blog etc. because I find his ideas provocative, although as yet it is too early to see what types of practice develop from them. Joyce Epstein (whose work is the central part of the classes I teach on community involvement) had some really good ideas on which two decades of other people have built strong practice. This leads me then to say we need four columns - because education is more than content, connection leading to, recognition and accreditation - in fact its main purpose from my point of view (pragmatist that I am) is to foster new and better practices in the world as a whole and for future education.
This leads to four ways that I see us developing reputations: first from the quality of our ideas (which hopefully translates to quality content). In the new world we are evolving to we will be responsible for designing distributed content so that our ideas have a chance of influencing wider audiences. We build our reputations as well through connections with others as peers and as educators. As education evolves probably fewer academics will earn their living with only one institution which provides excellence traveling from one university context to another. Third, our reputations WILL advance through our participation in learning networks, but I would not put this one in all caps. I think there are too many learning networks (just look at the proliferation of journals as an example) and believe that the future slide such as this one will show a big white box in the third column labeled: Big vat of networks.
At the end of the day, I believe that our reputations will continue to be based on the triple prongs of our ideas, our relationships and the actions that result from both. This adds two more tension points: 1) finding the efficiencies where content, relationships, foster and measure new practice and 2) determining efficient ways to feed those back into the rest of the pathways diagrammed.
If these ideas are interesting to you, then I encourage you to read other posts below about the larger participatory action research project group I would like to see form. By working together in diverse world context on linked local issues, we can move the general understanding of these ideas forward.
All the best,
Alana
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