I was a little scared when I read that the first CCK had 2200 participants and the second 700. If the course/theory about learning through your connections means I have to connect to that many people, how am I ever to manage.
Even with my Twitter account I’m approaching if not over the 1000 mark and it’s becoming more more difficult to look at it all. I think many people that hear about learning through a network or networks have that panic feeling initially about “How can I possibly read/view/follow it all?”
And then I breathed……
I though about my own advice that I often give people that I’m trying to explain the benefits of Twitter to and I watched Success in a MOOC.
And then I breathed again…….
You don’t have to follow it all. You don’t have to read it all. You read what interests you. You connect with smaller groups or communities within the larger network of all the people in the class, or all the people you follow on Twitter.
What is good about this practice and makes it all more manageable is that if you connect with a few great people that you know share great information….where do you suppose they are collecting some of it from….other connections within the greater network.
Consider this picture below. If you connect to A & D and they connect to B & C, you most likely will end up getting some of the best information from B & C even though you never truly connect to their RSS feeds, Twitter posts, bookmarks, blogs, pics, etc. In turn Person C is going to get some of your best information as well. Not from you, but from Person D or A as they are the people that follow you and share out your information to the network.
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You hit the nail on the head – you don’t have to read it all! I think this is an important concept when interacting online, even in smaller for-credit courses.
I signed up for the newsletter to get new blog posts (since I routinely just clear out Google Reader without reading a lot of news). I do hope that people choose descriptive blog post titles and not something like “Joe’s impressions of Connectivism” because then I have to click on every blog post to even know if things interests me.
I do plan on going back at some point and reading more about topics that don’t interest me as much now, because that is how we learn to expand our horizons.
My first post for this course sort of asked the same question as you – I don’t know how to keep up, and in a sense, for me at least, applies not just to this course, but to the whole sector!! But your take on how this should be done really sits well with me and I think will prove very useful. Thanks!
Great to hear this is helping. I`m very nervous myself. I signed up for this as a credit course as well (what was I thinking). If you do that and look forward at some point I have to develop and present a concept map.
I`ve no concept of a concept map, but I`m working on it. Post tomorrow on that topic.
Eek. This will be an interesting ride to say the least.
Hi,
You offer some very useful advice to a question that I think is plaguing many of us CCKers – thank you! The sheer amount of content also raises questions for me as to the role of the tutor in guiding and supporting the student through it all… http://ruthsexstone.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/blowing-in-the-wind/
Looking forward to your concept map (no pressure:) )
I signed up for credit, too, but I felt that was the self-imposed push I needed to stop being a lurker and start contributing. The volume of material put on by the facilitators isn’t the issue for me; I worry about all the other interesting things people are creating that I won’t be able to see! (The notion that there’s some other life I’m missing, I guess.)
Leah
That overwhelming panic felt by many plagues the educational field, and sadly is a real hindrance to some great learning. I try to encourage teachers to “let go” and not try to read every Reader item, post, or shared link. Linear thinking makes people want to control the flow and those drowning might just take us down too 🙂
Curation May Be a Solutoin to the problem
Checkout this info from Wikipedia.
My comments-
Digital literacies that grow naturally out of emerging technologies are changing the we learn, and do business. Secondly, and to me most importantly, just as we trust a museum curator to put the best on display to help us understand the display, topic, exhibit, we must trust others to lead us to keys areas for information. Otherwise we may just be lost in the deluge, just as managers complain they are lost in email. But we all put the different parts together differently and we still learn as we grow. And we all may relay on different curators to select what is important because they can, because of education and experience, shift through multiple patters and see relationships we might not see because we lack the experience.
“Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library or archive) is a content specialist responsible for an institution’s collections. The object of a traditional curator’s concern necessarily involves tangible objects of some sort, whether it be artwork, collectibles, historic items or scientific collections. More recently, new kinds of curators are emerging: curators of digital data objects, and biocurators.
More recently, advances in new technologies have led to a further widening of the role of curator. This has been focused in major art institutions internationally and has become an object of academic study and research.
In contemporary art, the title curator is given to a person who selects and often interprets works of art. In addition to selecting works, the curator often is responsible for writing labels, catalog essays, and other supporting content for the exhibition. Such curators may be permanent staff members, be “guest curators” from an affiliated organization or university, or be “freelance curators” working on a consultant basis.”
First MOOC, so frustration was about to take over – your post helped.