CCK09 Week One
Sunday, September 20th, 2009
Reflecting on the first week of CCK09, I particularly enjoyed Thursday’s second live session which went some way to explaining some key differences in George Siemens’ and Stephen Downes’ epistemologies. I’m instinctively drawn more towards Siemens’ perspective, founded as it is in a range of predominantly socio-cultural and cognitive learning theories. Both described the importance of the network and introduced the notion of immersion (how does this differ from participation exactly?) Yet whilst I find Siemens’ comments on wayfinding, sensemaking and pattern formation promising (particularly from a visual learning perspective), I have a problem with how little these network perspectives have engaged with learning processes such as reflection and meta-cognition, and rich complexities which exist in each and every connection; factors such as authenticity, reciprocity, power relation, temporality and sustainability. It’s early days yet, and no doubt CCK09 discourses I have not accessed – Siemens and Downes have stressed it is impossible to follow all threads, feeds, tweets etc. – may have began addressing such issues. I look forward to engaging with these in the following weeks.
