Essentialism & Connectivism

Trying to define something, even from the inside-out as I am attempting to do with my definition of Connectivism, introduces the sticky issue of essentialism. According to Wikipedia, Richard Cartwright has defined essentialism as "the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of … attributes all of which are necessary to its identity and function." In his book From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (2001), Saul Newman says that essentialism is the core political and philosophical issue of our age. The problem with essentialism is that it gets all tangled up in power. Some people always appropriate the power to define what others should be and who belongs inside the blessed group and who is relegated to the outside. The problem for Connectivism is that essentialism implies a nugget at the core of any entity or knowledge that is indivisible and indispensible and that is transferable to others of similar kind either through genetics or through social, religious, educational, or governmental ritual blessings.

I think I have tried to avoid essentialism through my use of the term DNA. In other words, I have started my definition of connectivism by talking about the DNA of connectivism, but this DNA can quite easily be viewed as essential, and taken one step further, as essentialism. It is a short intellectual step from saying, "At the core of connectivism lies the conviction that knowledge is a network phenomenon," to saying "Connectivists must believe that knowledge is a network phenomenon." It doesn't help much, to my mind, to say that the first view is descriptive and the second is prescriptive; so before I continue defining connectivism, I want to address the issue of essentialism.

I chose the term DNA only half consciously, but it isn't such an unfortunate choice, I don't think. DNA is itself a network phenomenon. Look at the images from Wikipedia:

Which of those nodes in the spinning double helix above is the essential characteristic that you are positing for whatever life form emerges from this DNA? The correct answer is none of them. The essential attribute that we want to assign to any entity is always an emergent property of some network, and that network is itself an emergent property of some other network, all the way down to strings (at least, we think so now—strings are as far down, or in, as we can push reality just now). The DNA that provided the starting point of Keith Hamon was itself an emergent property of a network of genes, which were a network of smaller things, all the way down. While we can actually locate the gene for my blue eyes in that spinning double helix above, my blue eyes aren't there in that DNA sequence. None of me is there. I am an emergence of this DNA, which forms a starting point for me, but is not sufficient to explain me. Though I cannot ignore this DNA in trying to define myself and become myself, I cannot reduce myself to this DNA, either. What is essentially me, then, is a dynamic interaction of networks on scales below me (DNA, for instance) and scales above me (society, for instance). I emerge both from the givens of those other scales (a gene for blue eyes and a meme for Judeo-Christian culture) and from the interactions between myself and those other scales. The interactions of characteristics on the scale of me with my DNA on one hand and society on the other (to pick just two other networks to which I belong) not only perturb me, but they also perturb those other networks. So where are the essential, stable characteristics of me that one can point to? I don't see them. If you see them, then you are focusing on one particular network scale and calling that the essential scale. I think you're wrong.

I am not quibbling with words here. I'm pointing to a problem with shifting among network scales, or levels. Any characteristic that I note at one network scale—my blue eyes, for instance—disappears when I shift down or up to another network scale. Moreover, those characteristics tend to shift through interactions with the other scales.

Consider Keats' sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer:

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The beauty, the meaning, and the passion for learning that we recognize in this poem (what we might call the poem's essence) is an emergent property. As soon as we dissect the poem into its individual words, we lose the beauty, the meaning, and the passion. We lose the poem. Though the poem absolutely depends on the properties of those individual words and sentence structures, it cannot be reduced to those structures. It cannot be reduced to the sonnet form: fourteen iambic pentameter lines arranged in two parts of two quartets and two tercets. Those things are essential starting points, DNA, but they ain't the poem.

So what prevents DNA from sliding into essentialism for me is that DNA is a beginning point not an ending point. It is a generative point, not a fixative point. It is where you start becoming, it isn't what you are.

But I can also avoid avoid entangling DNA with essentialism by distinguishing between two kinds of essentialism. I owe this distinction to a discussion about essentialism with Bruce Hood on the Edge website. Hood, an experimental psychologist, talks about what confers identity and uniqueness, and he works with two concepts that he picked up from the Medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus: quiddity and haecceity.

Quiddity is the invisible properties, the essence shared by members of a group, so that would be the 'dogginess' of all dogs. But the haecceity is the unique property of the individual, so that would be Fido's haecceity or Fido's essence, which makes Fido distinct to another dog, for example.

I think that quiddity is the aspect of essentialism that troubles me most, for it is the kind of essentialism most implicated in my mind with the abuse of power. Quiddity views an entity solely as a member or not of a particular group. Haecceity, on the other hand, sees an entity as itself. In Haecceity, then, essentialism is not what confines a person to one group or another, with all the resulting social, economic, and political implications of such an assignment; rather, essentialism is what distinguishes one entity from all else. For me, that essentialism is the intersection of all the biological, social, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, political, and economic arcs that run through my life to meet in this place called me at this time. In Randall Collins' terms, I am the precipitate of all those different arcs. I am the result of shifting warm fronts and cold fronts, rising and falling barometric pressure and humidity, shifting winds, that all converge to make me sunny or cloudy, cold or warm, balmy or stormy. I can deal with this sort of essentialism. What I can't accept is static essentialism—weather that never changes.

By the way, I don't mean to imply that Bruce Hood would agree with my use of these terms or my definition of essentialism. I think he is talking about essentialism in a slightly different way, but without reading much more, I can't say for sure. I'm using these terms to suit my own purposes.

Hood does say, though, that he thinks the self is an illusion or a narrative, by which I take it that he thinks the self is a creation of imagination, a cognitive construct that seems to be necessary to maintain some sense of sanity and balance in the world. But we are not, in fact, a single entity, not even in our brains. As Hood says, "We're not integrated entities inside our head, rather we're the output of a multitude of unconscious processes." He goes on to clarify:

I happen to think the self is a narrative, and I use the self and the division that was drawn by William James, which is the "I" (the experience of conscious self) and the "me" (which is personal identity, how you would describe yourself in terms of where are you from and everything that makes you up in your predilections and your wishes for the future). Both the "I", who is sentient of the "me", and the "me", which is a story of who you are, I think are stories. They're constructs and narratives. I mean that in a sense that a story is a reduction or at least it's a coherent framework that has some causal kind of coherence.

This actually resonates with the ideas of John Locke, the philosopher, who also argued that personal identity was really dependent on the autobiographical or episodic memories, and you are the sum of your memories, which, of course, is something that fractionates and fragments in various forms of dementia. … As we all know, memory is notoriously fallible. It's not cast in stone. It's not something that is stable. It's constantly reshaping itself. So the fact that we have a multitude of unconscious processes which are generating this coherence of consciousness, which is the I experience, and the truth that our memories are very selective and ultimately corruptible, we tend to remember things which fit with our general characterization of what our self is. We tend to ignore all the information that is inconsistent. We have all these attribution biases. We have cognitive dissonance. The very thing psychology keeps telling us, that we have all these unconscious mechanisms that reframe information, to fit with a coherent story, then both the "I" and the "me", to all intents and purposes, are generated narratives. The illusions I talk about often are this sense that there is an integrated individual, with a veridical notion of past. And there's nothing at the center. We're the product of the emergent property, I would argue, of the multitude of these processes that generate us.

If even our sense of self is ever shifting under the influence of forces that we don't control and are hardly aware of, then where is the static essentialism that people want to discover in others and in the world? I don't think it exists.

Rather, identity emerges in the interplay of lights that illuminate the dark from time to time, with different colors, different intensities, and different angles. We form these shifting lights into patterns that help us make sense of what we see only dimly, and we postulate a position for ourselves in this light show. Identity emerges from this, and then the lights change. Damn!

Well, this didn't go exactly where I thought it was going, but that's what makes it fun. I'll tell you a story about my hippie friend Boer. It was a cold, winter's day in 1970, and I was sitting with Boer as he tripped on acid. He asked me for a piece of paper, announcing that he wanted to write his name. He took up a pen and then paused, before saying, "I don't want to write my name. I already know my name. I want to write something I don't know so that I can read it and learn."

This has been my ambition for the past forty years. Sometimes I almost get there.

Connectivism and That Ol' Time Religion

I read with interest this morning an article by Thomas Frey called The Rise of the SuperProfessor, in which Mr. Frey forecasts the emergence of a class of elite professors who "consistently demonstrate excellence, passion, and clarity, throughout their academic careers" and who brand themselves and market their teaching excellence to the world, unencumbered and unsupported by the towers of academia. The superProfessors manage this rise, of course, through the affordances of the Net (thanks to Bon Stewart for my new favorite term, affordances, and to her excellent session in Change11). Mr. Frey notes the usual examples: Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, edX, the Minerva Project, the University of the People, iTunesU, Khan Academy, Learnable, Udemy, Codecademy, and Udacity. As I was reading, it dawned on me that I had seen this same transition before, but in churches, and I think that a quick look at what's emerging in traditional Christian denominations might be instructive for institutions of higher education.

Over the last 30 years or so, lots of SuperPastors (if you see an uncomfortable similarity to the term SuperProfessor, well … ) have discovered that they do not have to rely on a hierarchical denomination to build a whopping big church; rather, they can leverage those two great networks—the interstate superhighways and the information superhighway—to build churches that are as big as most state universities. Denominations have existed for centuries to provide local, usually small, congregations with the material, logistical, and organizational support that a small congregation could not provide itself. The local congregation needed an official denomination to sanction rituals, bless ministers, provide policies and procedures, print hymnals and Sunday School material, and so forth. In return, the local congregation sent financial support to the home office. But SuperPastors such as Rick Warren at Saddleback Valley Community Church in Lake Forest, CA, and Joel Osteen at Lakewood Church in Houston, TX, have discovered that they can get all of the logistical and material support they need without the encumberance of a centuries old hierarchical structure. They have swapped encumberance for affordance, and it works. These churches are wildly successful, at least in economic terms. According to a Forbes article, the top ten megachurches earned $8.5 billion dollars in 2009.

The point for me is that SuperPastors are learning that hierarchies are not an efficient way to deliver a message and build a community around that message, regardless of the message. Sebastian Thrun seems to have come to the same conclusion. He has a gospel that he wants to preach to the masses, and he has figured out that Stanford University is just too limiting. The MOOCs that Siemens, Downes, and Cormier have delivered over the past few years demonstrate the same principle: that a dedicated group of SuperProfessors can assemble sufficient infrastructure to build and sustain educational enterprises that do not require a traditional hierarchical institution. Even if they preserve their ties to an organization, they don't require them (many of the megachurches preserve their association with a denomination, but everyone knows that the denomination needs those megachurches more than the churches need the denomination). The Internet itself can provide all the material support, sanctions, specifications, and transactions necessary to create an educational institution. Or a church.

I see Connectivism as an ideally positioned concept to help higher education transition from a hierarchical model to a network/rhizomatic model. And the rhizomatic university will come about. I think it's a certainty. I'm just troubled by who will become the first Jan and Paul Crouch of online higher education.

And I'm just a bit annoyed that these conservative ministers have made the shift to the rhizome before we liberal educators have. I thought we were supposed to be the more flexible and open-minded. Imagine that: conservative Christian pastors as pioneers of post-structuralism.

I need a drink.

The Birth of a Text

As I wrote the last post, I had one of those nagging notions that I was leaving something out, that I had not quite said what I needed to say. I kept writing, hoping that the idea would present itself, as it so often does in writing, but it didn't arrive.

Then today at the office I was looking at the new TED-ED site in preparation for a writing lesson about using imagery in documents. I navigated to a page in search of Hans Rosling's quite marvelous video about data visualizations, when I noticed this other video from Deb Roy about how he traced the birth of language in his child by recording his home over a period of several years. I thought I remembered the Roy video and thought that I might review it again after I watched the Rosling video, which was really the video I needed, so I grabbed my mouse and clicked on the Roy video. Of course, it proved to be the video that I was looking for all along. It visualizes the structures I was trying to capture in my last post and not explaining so well.

I think my mind functions mostly underwater, and I am able to see only the surface. Most of my cognition, like the Internet, is submerged and hidden. Things arrive on my screen and in my conscious mind, but I too seldom know how they got there. Usually I don't think about it. It can be too troubling.

Anyway, let's watch this video, and I'll try to make the connection to writing as a function of complex networks. Deb Roy:



What captures my attention first is our emerging ability to capture and investigate large data sets. This ability is critical, I think, for understanding the network nature of texts and writing (or anything else, really). Those who study writing, through either rhetoric or poetic or both, have long had an intuitive sense of the network nature of writing, and we have developed concepts such as genre and process writing and schools such as feminist studies to try to embody those intuitions. Yet, we have never had the ability to collect and investigate texts as Deb Roy and his associates do in this movie where they can position a given television show (a text) within its ecosystems of other TV shows and the resulting social and scholarly buzz. They have access to the computer systems and networks that allow them to collect and investigate an amount of data that simply was not possible to collect and investigate with paper, even though we sensed the presence of those network structures and actions like some great sea creature moving in the depths, not seen clearly enough for analysis or even identification, but definitely felt.

Not only does Roy have the tools to capture and investigate the networks within which a television show emerges or within which a baby learns a new word—both the show and the word are texts to my way of thinking—but Roy can also express those networks in images and movies that help us to see not only the text itself but its emergence, movement, development, and interactions within its ecosystem. In other words, he can visualize with incredible accuracy the patterns that before we could only intuit in the life of the text but could not capture with any accuracy. Those of us who have had children know that our babies develop language, but Roy captures exactly how they develop it, and he contextualizes the text in ways that we could only intuit about our own babies. He demonstrates conclusively that there is no text without a context. Likewise, there is no context with the texts.

Of course, he can also tease out patterns that we can't even intuit are there. This is one of the most exciting promises of the digital humanities, to my mind. At last, we have the technological tools and techniques (and the promise of more) to capture the kinds of data sets necessary to wrap our heads around a complex network structure such as Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, which some researcher will soon think of as a complex strand of DNA, with its own internal network structures, introduced into an ecosystem of complex networks, taking root there, and then growing rhizomatically as it feeds value into that ecosystem and eats value from that ecosystem. That's enough work to occupy the entire professional life of a literary scholar. It will take a university of scholars with massive computing power to map the genome and the rhizomatic development of The Bible. That would be a damned fine project to work on, though. I hope someone does it in my lifetime.

Writing at Different Scales, #cck12

So what happens to the field of writing if we start with the idea that writing is a function of complex networks?

One of the first concepts that I draw from the study of networks is that network structures appear at most any scale from which you consider an entity. For instance, if we think of human consciousness as a function of complex networks, we find networks whether we consider consciousness at the molecular or cellular levels, the neuronal level, the brain regions level, the level of the nervous system as it extends throughout the body, and on to the sensory level, and out to the interpersonal, social, cultural, historical levels. Physics is currently able to push in to reality all the way to strings (those wispy networks of harmonic vibrations) and push out all the way to networks of galaxies. A dedicated student could follow consciousness all the way in to strings and all the way out to galaxies, I think.

Writing is similar. Whether we look at the scale of cognition, physico-motor, language, interpersonal, social, poetic/rhetoric, genre, or more, we find network structures at work. This text, for instance — this very post that I am writing and you are reading — can be thought of as a network structure: morphemes networked into various words, words networked into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into sections or posts, posts into a blog, the blog into larger educational, intellectual, and social networks. I think this network structure has always been a feature of written texts, but it was not obvious. Given the requirements of print, we tended to emphasize the linear nature of text, but we can think of this linearity in the same way we might consider a strand of DNA: linear if we view it one way, but very much a network if we shift our view just a bit. We can think of DNA strands as they unfold, or blossom, into a living organism. We can think of these sentences as they unfold into a living discussion. These sentences in this post are strands of DNA expanding in an ecosystem, creating an organism that interacts with other organisms, that both draws from and adds to the ecosystem/s within which it finds itself. And of course, hypertext makes explicit this network nature of written text.

But I think even standard printed text can also be seen as a network structure. For instance, this post is one node within this blog, and it interacts with the blog in much the same way that a new tadpole interacts with its puddle. This post draws value and energy from the blog as an ecosystem, and it feeds back its own value. I can scale down, and see the same dynamic at work: this very sentence is a node within this paragraph, and it draws meaning and value from the paragraph and returns meaning and value to the paragraph. This blog is easily seen as just one node within a network of blogs all exploring higher education, or writing, or Connectivism, or things I'm not even aware of.

And meaning emerges at all those different scales, and the meaning at one scale interacts with, supports, and modifies the meanings at the other scales, and we can see different meanings whether we are giving a text a close reading or fitting it into its larger genre. Different meanings emerge at different scales. This is a very dynamic way to think about writing and written texts, and it gives us dynamic tools for thinking about writing and for teaching writing. This, I think, is worth exploring.

We also see that the rules, the patterns of organization and interaction, can shift from scale to scale. This is a new idea for me just now, and I need to do more work on it, but it seems right. I like the ring of it.

Writing the Rhizome

Okay, for the sake of discussion, let's just accept that my last post is correct and that a network view of knowledge is indeed part of the DNA of connectivism. Let's even assume that this distinguishes connectivism from constructivism, cognitivism, and behaviorism as learning theories. Is this such a big deal?

I think so. Starting with a view that knowledge is a function of complex networks changes how I view everything else, especially everything about my own discipline. Also, starting from this vantage point allows me to connect to and cultivate different streams on energy. I'm fed differently than if I were starting from another point of view about how knowledge is produced and propagated.

My professional gig is writing — I write and I teach others to write. Connectivism, then, encourages me to say that writing is a function of complex networks at any scale I choose to consider it.

This is worth exploring, and for ease, let me start at the scale I'm working on just now. I'm writing a blog post about connectivism to mostly educators — at least the audience I'm aware of is mostly educators, and most of them at the college level. I write to connect to the conversation of those people. This conversation is a network structure facilitated by many other network structures: my own neural network, the Internet, a MOOC, the English language, educational theory, etc. Through writing, I both connect to the conversation (the network), and I exchange value with the other nodes (people and their own texts, mostly) in the network. I am writing, now, to connect to you and to exchange value with you.

Now, compare this view of writing to the traditional view of writing: a solitary student struggling to complete an assignment, writing about a topic that far too often does not interest him and writing to people (the teacher) to whom he does want to connect. The literary version of this image is not much better: a solitary, starving poet in his lonely garret overlooking Paris struggling to capture his vision of Life for an audience that will not find him until decades after his consumptive, wretched death. Neither of these writers connects to an ecosystem that feeds and nourishes them. None of us would want to be one of these poor wretches.

Actually, the student has an ecosystem, but he is punished for connecting to it (no talking in class). Notice that when students find that they can use writing to connect to their ecosystems (their peeps, gangs, and posses), then they will write their tails off. The last estimates I saw said that the world is now generating over 5 billion text messages per day. No other period in history can approach this volume of writing. Are you not amazed that most teenagers today would rather write to their friends than talk to them? That makes no sense from the traditional views of writing. It makes great sense if you think of writing as a function of complex networks in which nodes connect to nodes, exchange energy and value, and all are enriched. (I know that not all connections are enriching, and that way too often, people connect for the purpose of abusing, but even that kind of bullying is more easily understood — and dealt with — from a network perspective that looks at interconnected nodes in a functioning network than from the perspective of the morally deficient individual preying on others.)

Starting with the notion that the production and propagation of knowledge through writing is a function of complex networks allows me to think very differently about how and why people write. That prompts me to change the way I teach writing to others. I'll explore that soon, but likely I have not finished thinking about writing as a function of complex networks. There are other scales to play in this tune.

Connectivist DNA: Epistemology #cck12

I started this post weeks ago, but life happened. I want to continue talking about defining Connectivism.

So if we are to avoid a definition of Connectivism that disjoins the theory from similar theories and from the rest of the world and reduces the theory to a handful of essential characteristics how should we proceed? Morin says that we proceed by "distinction, conjunction, and implication" (51). I guess that clarifies things. Let's see.

We distinguish Connectivism as a theory about education without separating it from other such theories about education and without separating it from the very thing that it seeks to illuminate: Education. We look for both the particular starting point of Connectivism and the connections that Connectivism affords us (connections should be easy for a Connectivist theory). The starting point is the DNA; the connections are the flows of energy, matter, organization, and information between Connectivism and its eco-system. Thus, we distinguish Connectivism from Cognitivism, say, but we do not disjoin it from Cognitivism. Rather, we include in our definition the flows of energy between the two. Likewise, we look for the flows of energy and information between Connectivism and all those who have explored it and between the theory and the actual practice of Education. We also include our own DNA and the DNA of others who are exploring Connectivism. We assume, then, that Connectivism is defined by the dialogue, the unresolved tension and interplay, between its DNA and its eco-system. Connectivism is what emerges within this dialogue. This is a start.

For me, the first bit of Connectivist DNA is found in its epistemology. This is not a casual choice, but one that reflects my interest in rhetoric, my own intellectual DNA. In his book Rhetoric and Reality (1987), James Berlin says that the rhetorics of the 20th century can be defined by their epistemologies. In fine Cartesian fashion, he disjoins the three main strains of 20th century rhetoric and reduces each to a central tenet about how knowledge is generated and propagated. I have an interest, then, in what a Connectivist, or rhizomatic, rhetoric might look like, so I want to follow Berlin's lead—if not his methodology—and begin with epistemology. Given that Education is all about the generation and propagation of knowledge, epistemology has much to recommend it as a starting point.

So what is the epistemological DNA that Connectivism brings to the eco-system? Both Downes and Siemens write about knowledge, but I'm drawn first to Downes' 2005 article An Introduction to Connective Knowledge, mostly because I'm familiar with it, but also because it has received significant reading from others and, finally, because I just reread it. For me, this article makes about as clear and concise a statement about knowledge as an article can make when it says that "Knowledge is a network phenomenon, to 'know' something is to be organized in a certain way, to exhibit patterns of connectivity. To 'learn' is to acquire certain patterns. This is as true for a community as it is for an individual."

At the heart of Connectivism, then, is this idea that knowledge is not some thing, like a nugget, that we can pass among ourselves and reduce to a nifty definition. Knowledge is not a nugget that resides either in objective, external things or in a subjective, internal mind. Rather, knowledge is a function of complex networks. Knowledge is the pattern of dynamic connections among various nodes regardless of whether the nodes are neurons in an individual brain, people within an individual community, communities within an individual society, or societies within an epoch. Knowledge is what emerges from the patterns of interactions of millions of individual neurons functioning according to their own rules of behavior and in response to the rules of the clusters of neurons they have joined or found themselves grouped with. Knowledge on a different scale is what emerges from the patterns of interactions of millions of individual people according to their own rules of behavior and in response to the rules of the clusters of people they have joined or found themselves grouped with. While the specific mechanisms and rules may vary from node to node and scale to scale, the pattern seems remarkably consistent: meaning and knowledge emerge from the unresolved, dynamic interplay between an individual node and its network/s of other nodes.

This view of knowledge seems to me to be different from that of other educational theories. Behaviorism, as I understand it, appears to place meaning and knowledge firmly in the objective, external world of observable, measurable behaviors, and it focuses on developing those behaviors. Cognitivism, on the other hand, places meaning and knowledge in the subjective, internal world of the mind, however defined, and it focuses on developing those cognitive skills and resources. As I understand constructivism, it places meaning and knowledge in the interaction of the individual mind with reality. Social constructivism expands the concept by adding the social group to the mix so that meaning and knowledge is created by the individual in her interaction both with reality and the group. Social constructivism, then, focuses on developing those interactions among the individual, the group, and reality. This approaches, perhaps even implies, a network structure, but I don't know that it requires it.

I am aware that my statements about the above theories are gross reductions that distort the ideas of some brilliant thinkers, and I do not want to suggest that those theories and thinkers do not have tremendous value in helping us understand knowledge and how people learn. I am least fond of behaviorism, but that line of thought has generated true insight into humanity and education. They have all contributed, but I do want to say that I think we can see and understand things differently by starting from the view that knowledge is a function of complex networks, as Connectivism does. And I think that particular starting point is part of the DNA of Connectivism, but not core to the other theories, not even social constructivism. I think one can be a social constructivist without a commitment to knowledge as a function of networks. I know that one can be a behaviorist or a cognitivist without any consideration of networks. I don't think one can be a Connectivist without that very commitment.

So what do we gain by saying that knowledge is a function of networks? If we climb this particular mountain, then what do we see that we didn't see from the other peaks? What can we connect to from this starting point that we could not connect to so easily from the other starting points? I want to explore that.

Sentences from the Inside, #cck12, #change11

I keep thinking that I'm going to move from the middle of connectivism to start defining it, but then I think of something else to say, or I come across something someone else has said, and I start talking about the middle again. This afternoon's online New York Times features an essay about writing by Constance Hale in which she says:

At some point in our lives, early on, maybe in grade school, teachers give us a pat definition for a sentence — “It begins with a capital letter, ends with a period and expresses a complete thought.” … But that definition misses the essence of sentencehood. We are taught about the sentence from the outside in, about the punctuation first, rather than the essential components. The outline of our [sentences], the meaning of our every utterance, is given form by nouns and verbs. … I like to think of the whole sentence as a mini-narrative. It features a protagonist (the subject) and some sort of drama (the predicate): The searchlight sweeps. Harvey keeps on keeping on. The drama makes us pay attention. [Italics and bolding added for emphasis.]

This, I think, points to the problem with most definitions. Saying that a sentence begins with a capital letter, ends with a period and expresses a complete thought is the very least that we can say about a sentence. The very least.

And our students know that. They know that this definition says next to nothing, and most of them wisely ignore it, or if they do force themselves to remember it for the quiz at the end of the week, they ditch it at the classroom door immediately afterward. Wise them. They know that this definition will never connect them to good writing, to the magic that lies at the heart (the middle) of crafting a beautiful sentence. Or even a functional sentence. Students know that if they really want to learn what writing is, then they have to learn it from the inside out, the way they learn video games. They learn Skyrim from the middle, and they have to write from the middle. The above definition separates them from writing. Who's interested in that?

You also have to define from the middle, and maybe soon I can actually start doing that.