E-DUCT-ation: The Pipes, The Pipes

So there I was, trying to do my Connectivism homework this weekend when...but wait, you wondered how I "figured out what the assignment was"? Well, finding out what the "homework" is could be done just as well by laying out a fleece to see if the morning dew would appear upon it or playing Bible roulette, but you can also just click around on the teachers' blogs, as they have no shortage of papers and podcasts and whatnot to follow. Checking through email (I had the firehose shut off, but it started spraying again for reasons that bewilder me), I found that on September 4, George in fact did provide links to a) a course line b) the Moodle c) a wiki (*holds up cross*) so for the real eager beagers and get-aheads you could have seen the essentials of a crib sheet back then. But, somewhere -- and don't ask me where -- I found what I will call a Car Talk by the Click and Clack of Connectivism, George and Stephen, on ustream.

I listened to them being interviewed by a guy who seemed impatient after each question, who held up the microphone for them to talk for awhile, then abruptly said "cool!" each time and tried to move them along -- he wasn't listening. For some reason, of all things, he began to Car Talk with the Skeptic thread started by one Catherine Fitzpatrick. Good Lord, these people don't get out much. I would figure a thread like that would collect some hardy resonances, and then be buried in the avalanche of threads from 2000 joiners. But, that's not how life is online, where people live in rigid conformity and conservatism, wrapped up in the guaze not only of Netiquette but notions of feel-good and positive discourse that makes you feel like you're either at a Club Med bunnyhop or a Lifespring seminar in the 1980s. You keep glancing nervously around for Tony Robbins and perhaps some health shake. But instead of engaging with the actual content of the ideas and questions I had, they were all marvelling over the phenomenon itself of somebody just not believing. Somebody just stepping up and saying "I don't buy this." As good Connectivists who have a kind of dutiful nod to democracy and freedom (but not really), they have to concede skepticism and critics. But, as we learned from Stephen, you don't have to engage them, because it's important just to get everybody to believe first, to explicate the doctrine, and then you can parse it later with those who seem particularly competent -- but not every passing doubter.

Stephen distinguished himself by saying that his politics were based on his science. Now, I know a politics based on science like that. It's called "Marxism". I look forward to hearing what Stephen's politics are, but I'll bet you dollars to donuts that he has the usual collection of lefty college beliefs playing out with predictable patterns, all as if they are original and not all traced back to Chomsky lol.

But as I was saying, I had taken some notes on Car Talk, and also read an essay of George's that ended with something like "or is this all self-amusement" (answer: yes!), and was getting ready to blog it, when WHOOPS my computer crashed. Ah, connectivism, that fragile and flimsy flower that blooms for an hour in paradise and then is no more. I bet they have a backup plan for when they really take over with Connectivism to have all kinds of redundant systems to make sure connections aren't lost.

I also found a guy who had sort of critiqued George and digested him a little bit better than he digests himself -- but all this is gone now. At some point I'll dredge through History, but as they used to say at one cult workshop I attended, "what sticks, sticks."

And here's what sticks:

1. The pipes, the pipes. They are more important than the content. Creating the connections, the connections themselves, are more important than the knowledge/facts inside them. This is not something I will buy, because pipes are mere plumbing. Your computer crashes, they are gone. They are ephemeral, and misleading. Facts, in this concept of George's, are mutable. Knowledge is always needing updating. You can't think of it as "warehoused" because it needs refreshing. This is of course a kind of fiction that overlays mentation from web experiences. The geek is always releasing new versions of the software with bugs. You never saw, oh, Thomas Aquinas keep releasing 2.0 or 3.0 of the Summa lol. Friedman might release 2.0 and 3.0 of his textbooks, but his information isn't so much changed as it is enhanced with fresher examples and new ideas are published. With this fungeability of knowledge, naturally you are left, like Pontius Pilate, to ask what truth is.

2. Knowledge is externalized on the network, you don't need to internalize it. Hence the need to drop memorization, hoarding, etc. As I said to one of the die-hard lefties on the Muddle, whose going to do all the work, comrade? You don't memorize anymore or learn facts about old dead white guys because if you need to know, say, about how they had cannibalism in Jamestown, why, you just find a website about it, you don't have to memorize "1607" anymore, it's irrelevant. So...I pointed out that this theory of externalization requires at least some people/worker bees to fill up the connection nodes. THe knowledge can "just be there" precisely because some people are working all the time to fill up the stations for others to draw on. And this sort of unequal distribution of labour on an ostensibly feel-good, everybody-is-equal "distributive" system is suspect to me. Only a few people edit Wikipedia. It isn't the masses. The long tail is very long; the repeat editors are relatively few. On any subject you know something about, you find it is "off" or even tendentious. You don't get in and work on it, because your work can either be undone in a heartbeat by the next loon to come along, or your will be ensnarled in editing wars.

3. People always seem to misunderstand or not get this theory, and so the teacher must constantly descend into it with correctives of reductivism. You can never understand it *enough*. In that, it reminds me of the cult of BDSM in SL, where the practitioners constantly deliver scornful and superior diatribes to critics that they haven't understood properly, that they haven't studied and experienced the wonders of BDSM. You are always put off balance. You are always told you are wrong, and your criticism is a function of failure to first concede the theory/lifestyle and experience it as an indoctrinated one. When you object, and say, but that's brainwashing. That's gaslighting. That's coercion. And that's what I object to. They begin again the chant about how you just haven't understood deeply enough blah blah blah.

There's lots more, but this is about all I have time to consider out of the theory's premises, but I do want to make a few more comments.

For one, a lot of the thrill of Connectivism is, as Mixed Realities said somewhere the other day, about people simply liking the word "connect" and figure it will give them meaningful relationships and connections. It's a feel-good word, and that alone gets some of the masses to come in droves, looking for hook-ups. They don't especially care about studying learning theory, they are there to have a groovy online experience. It's like the Shinda Moon thing I saw in Showcase today. It's nothing but some of that droony Groove Salad music on the land menu, a few rocks in the sky, some particles, and some meditation poses, but it has traffic 32,000 because people are suckers for moon-dances lol.

A lot of giddy stuff happens around a thing like this where people are self-consciously pinching themselves every five seconds and telling each other that they're grand. I feel every time I go on there that there are a bunch of drunks singing, "We're here...because we're here...because we're here....because we're hheeeeere!" and then a round of "99 connections of connectivity on the wall, 99..."

So people engage in various busy-body sort of feel-good stuff that in my view is completely useless and irrelevant. Someone thinks an "ethnography" of the 2,000 gathered by happenstance is in order, possibly they'd like to thumb-suck about structures of white North American racism online (did you see that completely fake study in There.com the other day?!) -- something they may have a hard time ginning up this time as there are so many people who logged on from places like Turkey. Still, you can only log on if you have a connection, so to speak, and it will undboutedly show more Europeans and Canadians -- and someone will have a spasm about the digital divide before we're done, no doubt.

Another pointless distraction is making Wordles or maps of connections of everything that is...connected already -- these are particularly touchingly silly as they are completely subjective and are like children playing at science. It's like the way my brother, when he was about 3, used to shout importantly, every time we passed those old electrical power stations that always used to be next to the roadside, "There's my school!" He thought "school" was something complicated and important and scientific looking, and those power stations would do as well as anything -- he was so looking forward to growing up and going to school!

More mindless exercises -- Stephen Downes trying to shoehorn the entire course structure into software not intended for it just to be able to say he was using opensource newfangled stuff. He could have really just as lief made a Yahoo Group, for God's sake. Not high tech enough, I guess.

Or let's take people suggesting that in order to really grok on the full grooviness of Connectivism, we should all just randomly pick people out of the list and introduce ourselves and "learn from them". Like a Connectivism speed-date. I had a few people-collectors like that on Facebook try to force-friend me and I made short work of that -- I don't like networking for network's sake. People try to convince themselves that these meaningless patterns of data are meaningful -- what they bring to the table is their ardent belief. It's a lot like born-agains saying Jesus loves them and has a plan for their life. Connectivism shows them the way, giving them linkies, and people send them linkies, and there's lots of linkie love...

I really do hope there will be some sensible college presidents and school administrators out there who will stare this stuff down and not let it creep like kudzu further into the Internet.

It reminds me a lot of the giddyness of twitter, where you can see all this in accelerated form:

o PR person spams their URL about working Web 2.0 which has their vanity-published book about SEO on it and web 2.0 goodness in your business.

o Some people resent this and challenge them and they respond with earnest civic wide-eded web2edness.

o They then go to a conference and make new friends and Twitter with them and sell their book, or they charge to have a conference and make $695 from some of their Twitter friends

o All of them begin to tweet on cue then about how wonderful it is to go to a seminar and learn about things and get help from groups and networks, and isn't it grand, and no business should be without it

Amanda Chapel is particularly good at cutting through the tangles of all this giddyness and pointing out that there's no there there. It's pouring from the empty into the void. There isn't any content; the content is about the pipes, and a book about the pipes, and a seminar about the pipes, and no money is really changing hands, except a few hustlers and hucksters are making a dime from it, here and there -- nothing like real money though.

I am trying to develop a working hypothesis about Connectivism. Is is merely an annoying Internet fad that will ebb as another fad replaces it? Or it is determined Bolshevism disguised as bland Canadian cyber learning theory that is essentially organizing guerilla warfare to bring the totalitarianism of the future?

I'm leaning toward the latter right now because of two major patterns I see in it now:

1. Lysenkoism. All this talk of correlaries with the brain, neuroscientific similarities, etc. etc. They can never explain why, if this was all so natural and organic and the science of the brain, learning didn't replicate or model it all these centuries. Where does all this institutional stuff come from so antithetical to Connectivism if it is so true?

2. Nihilism. They are not content to merely walk around what could be outdated structures or traditional institutions, or just let them be (of course at some level they do let them be as they continue to hold jobs in them instead of burning them down). No, they have to either actively destroy them by constantly insisting on all kinds of new modes of connectivity, undermining traditional authority. OR they have to say it is all dying and disintegrating -- and overstate this and overreport this to help be a factor for in fact hastening it.

So with both of these isms, I have to say -- no, that's not true. The Internet didn't so change people that they began to think or work differently. Instead, some aspects of their work and thinking have been enhanced, just as they have been with any media. But others have been suppressed, and maybe that represents a loss, and an avoidable loss. I'm also working to see whether I personally will be an anti-Connectivist or moderate Connectivist who will advocate Connectivism only as descriptive of where it actually exists, and not prescribe it as a doctrine.

I don't think if you have substituted to the Pied Piper of Hamlin for the schoolmarm, that you have achieved something true or lasting.

Comments

[Prokofy Neva]

If you want to get a sense of that "we're here because we're here" drunk stuff, go here:
http://edtechtalk.com/node/3295

You can also see them talking like the scared rabbits of the LL forums about "he who shall not be named".

[Jane2]

Oh, so that's what connectivism is...I read some Roland Legrand post about changing Metanomics into "connectivism" and immediately thought, oh here we go...a bunch of ex-philosophy grad students boiling the ocean again.

Do people actually pay for this course in 500 ways to talk to the people you already talk to?

[Ann Otoole]

Send this stuff to Penn & Teller. Sounds like a great topic for coverage on an episode of Bullshit.

[Darien Caldwell]

Sorry, I can't even begin to try to read that. It's like someone barfed after eating a bag of buzzwords.

People are free to go off and live in their connectivism world, they'll just be completely disconnected from the rest of society. :\

[El Kabong]

Oh please, please keep this up. I am not being sarcastic. I want to see some asshole try to use externalized knowledge to drive. Agh!

p.s. I can actually do shit when the power is out.