The Nodes and Edges of Connectivism

I've just finished reading Scott Weingart's Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II, in which Mr. Weingart tries to correct the misuse of networks by humanities scholars. He provides a basic and quite clear explanation of what networks are and what they are not, how current technology can analyze networks, and what technology can say about networks, and most importantly, what it cannot say about networks.

Along the way, he provides the DNA for networks, and this reminds me of how fractal and complex networks are, with networks nested within networks and interacting across multiple scales. If networking is part of the DNA of connectivism, then what is the DNA of networking? Weingart gives me a few handles to work with.

He starts his discussion by defining networks in a typical fashion: networks "stand for any complex, interlocking system. Stuff and relationships [emphasis in the original]." He calls the stuff nodes and the relationships edges, in keeping with common terminology. A network, then, is a collection of nodes that are in some way related along recognizable edges. Stuff and relationships, or nodes and edges, are part of the DNA of networks. This is simple and intuitive enough, and Weingart makes this definition directly applicable to connectivism when he notes that

generally, network studies are made under the assumption that neither the stuff nor the relationships are the whole story on their own. If you’re studying something with networks, odds are you’re doing so because you think the objects of your study are interdependent rather than independent. Representing information as a network implicitly suggests not only that connections matter, but that they are required to understand whatever’s going on.

Starting with these basic concepts, then, I immediately think that there isn't any information – or any other thing, for that matter – that cannot be represented as a network. Indeed, I agree with Weingart "not only that connections matter, but that they are required to understand whatever's going on." I think this is Downes' point when he says on his blog, "At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks."

Both the Universe and our knowledge of it are network phenomena. Actually, I already object to that statement as it seems to suggest that our knowledge is something apart from the Universe. It isn't. Our knowledge is somehow an active node in the universal network, connected along multiple edges, just as natural an emergent phenomenon as rocks are.

I don't know that either Weingart or Downes would completely agree with the statement that everything is a network phenomenon, but it makes sense to me. I can usefully model everything as a network – this very post, for instance.

This post is a multiscale network: nodes joined by edges to form the nodes joined by other edges at other scales. As nodes, letters network to form morphemes, which network to form words, which network to form sentences, which network to form paragraphs, which network to form posts, which network to form blogs, which network to form conversations, and so on. And this covers just the syntactical view of the network. We can then look at the semantic networks in which subject, verbs, objects, and other nodes network together to create concepts, which network together to create arguments and explanations, which network together to create a belief system, which network with other belief systems to create a conversation, and so on.

It is quite useful to me, then, to think of this post as a network structure, and whatever knowledge emerges herein "is distributed across a network of connections" that shifts in scale from letters and morphemes to conversations about networks, education, and knowledge. This knowledge emerges for me as I write – adding, rearranging, deleting, and shifting words and sentences about – and for you as you read – scanning for patterns of meaning using the syntactical cues I've left behind. I hope that the pattern of knowledge that emerges for you as you read this post is reasonably similar to the pattern of knowledge that is emerging for me as I write this post. If the two patterns are reasonably self-similar (and I'm not exactly sure how we can ever establish that for certain), then I will believe that I have communicated my message to you, that I have somehow transferred knowledge from me to you, even though we both know that nothing was transferred.

But there is no guarantee. Every speaker, writer, or actor is aware that an audience can perceive very different patterns in the same configuration of words, sentences, and paragraphs. My father – an old-fashioned, hellfire-and-brimstone preacher – frequently remarked that most of his congregation heard sermons that he never preached. The message they heard depended more on their own sense of guilt and sinfulness than on his choice and arrangement of words.

Once this post is published, then, it becomes a node in a network of people (you and I) who each engage the overall network of writer, reader, and text from different vantages. It should be no surprise, therefore, that knowledge emerges in different ways for each of us, sometimes slightly different, sometimes radically.

If nothing else then, the complex, multi-scale, network nature of writing helps me understand and explain why even a simple piece of writing such as one of my brilliantly clear and concise writing assignments can receive such divergent interpretations, with almost every student doing something different. If knowledge was a discrete, transferrable thing, then I could give all my students the same thing, but because knowledge is an emergent pattern scattered across a network of words, I can hope only for a reasonably similar pattern blossoming in the minds of my students. Sometimes the magic happens. Sometimes it doesn't.

Time for a SmOOC?

Motivated by Bon Stewart's efforts to unpack the MOOC buzzword and now by Jenny Mackness' thoughts about the explosion of MOOCs in higher education, I want to say a bit more about the appropriation of MOOCs by universities and corporations.

One could be kind to the universities that are, in Mackness' words, "jumping on the MOOC bandwagon at an alarming rate," and say that at least they recognize a good new wine when they see it and that they are putting the new wine into old skins mostly because that's what they know how to do, but really, I don't know how kind such a comment would be, and anyway, I'm not sure the universities are that benign (used mostly in the medical sense of not being malignant). A more cynical train of thought might suggest that we are witnessing a movement by the forces of control to counter and appropriate, to quote the blog Learning Spaces, "smooth spaces where nomadic thinking can occur, and is indeed encouraged."

The writer of Learning Spaces (BTW, I don't know the name of this person. Can anyone tell me? Thanks) argues that corporatisation of education reflects a shift from disciplinary societies to societies of control, as described by Gilles Deleuze in his article Postscript on the Societies of Control (1992). Learning Spaces says, "In education this [control] is characterised through dataveillance and ever more strict frameworks for accountability, particularly through the work of Ofsted. However, whilst restrictions and creeping privatisation have led to a loss of professionalism and increasing homogenisation of the educative process, Deleuzean geophilosophy emphasises the potential for individuals and groups to create alternative spaces for professional creativity and debate." I believe that MOOCs began as explorations "for individuals and groups to create alternative spaces for professional creativity and debate." I think this more open space is core to the idea of MOOCs (part of the DNA), and that most of us are suspect of what we see as the compromise of this open space by recent versions of MOOCs rolled out by more corporate bodies. I think that Bon Stewart, Jenny Mackness, and others will agree. Stewart notes that MOOCs "grew, initially, as learning networks of emergent knowledge focused around educational technologies: in other words, around complexity and disruptive innovation in higher ed." Mackness says about the very first MOOC, CCK08, that it "was an experiment in getting people to think about learning differently." We don't see this same openness in some of the latest, most notorious versions of MOOCs.


The openness of MOOCs means that MOOCs can be hijacked for different purposes. This is intentional, I think. The idea is for people, or even institutions, to connect freely to a MOOC and to use it for their own educational purposes. I hijacked a couple of the MOOCs I engaged, using them as supplemental readings and discussion springboards for a faculty development program in writing across the curriculum. A few of the faculty at my local university actually liked the hijack enough that they enrolled themselves into the MOOCs and into subsequent MOOCs.


Others, particularly corporations and corporatized institutions, will hijack MOOCs and do things with them that we early MOOCers are not likely to appreciate. I find a possible explanation for this misappropriation in Deleuze's essay Postscript on the Societies of Control and in Learning Spaces educational riff on that essay. Deleuze says that society is shifting from what Foucault called disciplinary societies with its various enclosed environments (prisons, hospitals, families, factories, schools, etc.), each with its own rules and hierarchical structures to what Deleuze calls societies of control, in which individuals are turned into dividuals, separate data streams captured and manipulated by the corporations that own the data streams (Google, Facebook, Apple, international banks come immediately to mind). As Deleuze succinctly says, "Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt." Deleuze does not appear to see this as progress. For our argument, he sees some dire possibilities for education: "Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation."


This line of thought seems to suggest that we should expect the educational corporations to hijack MOOCs for the purpose of establishing their controls over the data streams that MOOCs generate. We should also expect old-style schools to reject MOOCs as they try to preserve their enclosed and managed spaces. What Mackness calls cognitivist MOOCs, then, are likely to be threatened from two directions:

1. The old-style schools (disciplinary societies) will seek to control MOOCs either by blocking MOOCs from their enclosed spaces (forbidding laptops and smartphones in the classroom), or by bringing MOOCs into their enclosed spaces where they can manage them as they've managed things for two hundred years.
2. The new-style schools (societies of control) will seek to control MOOCs by extending the mechanisms of control (salary, marketing, and validation, for example) that ironically use the same technological substrate as MOOCs: modern computers and networks.

I don't think the old-style schools are any threat to MOOCs. As Deleuze says of all old-school, disciplinary societies: "We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. … The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the _societies of control_, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies." The old schools will not survive the steamroller that Deleuze calls the societies of control.

I think the new-style schools, however, are a great threat to connectivist MOOCs. They understand and use technology that enables MOOCs of any stripe, and they believe (unlike the old-schools) that their very life depends on establishing control over the data streams that open educational resources such as MOOCs create.

All is not bleak, however. Deleuze notes that this period of transition from disciplinary societies to societies of control holds real promise as well as peril. As new regimes of control emerge in home, school, factory, and hospital: 

There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

I think, then, that our best new weapons are more connectivist MOOCs that "express new freedom," knowing full well that others will offer near enemies: MOOCs that establish control over the various data streams that feed into and out of a MOOC. I especially like Jenny Mackness' idea of SmOOCs, or small open online courses. I think it's time to offer a SmOOC. It looks like a fine, new weapon to me.

What's the Matter with MOOCs?

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article entitled What's the Matter with MOOCs?, Siva Vaidhyanathan dismisses the current obsession with MOOCs as "something that very wealthy private institutions offer for free, at a loss, as a service to humanity." He adds insult to injury by adding that he, indeed, enjoys MOOCs: "Let me pause to say that I enjoy MOOCs. I watch course videos and online instruction like those from the Khan Academy … well, obsessively. I have learned a lot about a lot of things beyond my expertise from them. My life is richer because of them. MOOCs inform me. But they do not educate me. There is a difference."

Those of us who have actually been in a MOOC will find Vaidhyanathan's argument silly at best and outrageously unfortunate at worst (kudos to John Mak for trying to correct Vaidhyanathan's errors). His failure to understand MOOCs is catastrophic and staggering. Vaidhyanathan has failed scholarship and done a great disservice to the Academy and its conversation about MOOCs, which have almost nothing to do with online video banks or rich, private universities, but with collaborative communities created more often than not from somewhat remote, public universities. Still, I suppose this sort of misunderstanding is bound to happen.

Eventually, any theory or practice worth its salt moves beyond its origins and begins to take on a life of its own. The same will happen to Connectivism. Others will begin to define and shape Connectivism, perhaps in ways that Downes and Siemens do not anticipate and will not support, but it will happen if Connectivism doesn't die first. It seems to be happening more quickly with MOOCs. Luck of the draw?

I'm not sure, but I do have a connectivist/rhizomatic explanation for it that turns me back to my own discipline of writing. A newly-minted theory (and Connectivism is still rather new in the history of educational theory) is like a newly-minted book (or a newly-minted baby, nation, or computer system): it has a generative point with a rather limited DNA, but once it is released into the eco-system, then the theory (or book, baby, nation, system) takes on its own life, direction, and development that the originators (or writer, parents, founders, inventors) seldom anticipate and never control. I'm reminded of a story about Robert Frost reading his poem The Road Not Taken, and afterward, responding to a young woman who asked him what the famous poem really meant. He asked her in turn what she thought it meant; whereupon, she spoke at length. When at last she concluded, he said that, from then on, that's what the poem would mean to him.

I don't know if the story is factual, but it is true, and Frost was wise to understand that the meaning of his poem no longer belonged to him, unless he wanted to rewrite the poem, and then it would just be another poem that he would eventually lose control of.

Of course, Cormier, Downes, and Siemens, along with others, are still writing Connectivism and MOOCs, and I'm certain that they still have points to add and clarify, but really, they can only supply the generative DNA. The growth and development of Connectivism and MOOCs will depend on so much more. Let's hope that they enjoy watching their baby grow.

Connectivism and Complexity

Well, I look around, and it's been a month since I've written. How does that happen? I could list the details, but they aren't that interesting – family, work, and medical appointments mostly. Fortunately, all is well with my world.

The sad part for my blog is that I've lost my train of thought. As I recall, I was thinking about networking as part of the DNA of connectivism, and the DNA comment elicited a comment from Stephen Downes about my confused attempt to reconcile connectivism and essentialism. My last post was an attempt to figure out why Downes thought I was trying to reconcile the two concepts when actually I was trying to establish that DNA did not imply an essentialist approach. Was it poor writing, poor reading, or a mix of both? And did connectivism have an explanation for that kind of communication failure?

Those are good questions, and I will attempt to come back to them and to the general issue of networking as one of the generative concepts of connectivism sometime in the future, but today (July 4th, as I start this post with a free morning. Happy Birthday, USA) I want to talk about a second bit of DNA in connectivism: complexity. I've just finished reading Melanie Mitchell's Complexity: A Guided Tour, and the topic is on my mind.

To my mind, complexity is concomitant to networking. We can think of networks as static, fixed entities, much like the pictures in our books, as shown to the right (thanks to Scott Weingart's Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II in the Journal of Digital Humanities for this pic and lots of other ideas about networks that I intend to explore later):

This is a helpful abstraction of networking, but it misses much that is interesting about networking: the dynamism which results from the nodes of the network engaging each other and the larger eco-system. This dynamic engagement is complexity. Rather, this is what I mean by complexity, and I think that complexity is one of the amino acids in the DNA of connectivism. As with the concept of networking, complexity is not unique to connectivism. A scholar can follow a constructivist or behaviorist agenda, for instance, and incorporate both networking and complexity. However, I think a scholar can still be a constructivist or behaviorist without accounting for networking and complexity. I don't think that a connectivist can do so. These two concepts are part of the DNA.

If Mitchell is correct, then complexity is not a settled scientific term. As she says: "There is not yet a single science of complexity but rather several different sciences of complexity with different notions of what complexity means" (95). This provides me with some wiggle room to decide what I mean by complexity, but I do not stray far from Mitchell's own use of the term in her discussions of information, computation, analogies, and information processing in living systems. It seems to me that complexity is the amount and/or degree of engagement of an entity with its ecosystem – or to put it in terms of networking: the amount of engagement among the nodes of a network and between that network and other networks.

This definition lands me squarely in the issue of information and information processing, of which my own discipline, writing, is a subset. So I really like this definition, and for the moment it is the one I will use. For me, then, complexity is the degree to which any node in a network can recognize, process, and respond to information from the other nodes in its network and from other networks at different scales. This information processing appears to extend throughout reality from simple, almost mechanical physical and chemical reactions through the ideas and societies of humanity and beyond to God, Gaia, or whatever you may believe exists at some network scale beyond us. Information processing stitches the universe together and drives it through its unfolding expressions, including us humans and our societies and languages. It may be, as Mitchell suggests, that we humans may someday consider information as one of the fundamental aspects of the Universe along with mass and energy, but … I'm getting way beyond my level of competence. That is sheer fantasy for me; still, it's of vital interest to me that information processing seems to be such a core function of life.

Mitchell describes several ways that this information processing occurs in different systems from immune systems, neural networks, and ant colonies to genetic and metabolic networks. In all of these systems, if I understand her argument correctly, the individual nodes (neurons, ants, lymphocytes, etc.) are able to recognize patterns in their own network and in their ecosystems (some nodes work locally in their own networks and some globally beyond their local networks). These patterns are the information that each node can process, or understand, and can then respond to. This seems to me to match quite nicely with Stephen Downes' contention that human knowledge has much to do with pattern recognition and with negotiating our way through networks. While human thought may work at a different scale of complexity than, say, a lymphocyte binding to an antigen, the concept is similar, or fractal: the same pattern at a different scale.

To some degree, each network node (from bacteria, to slugs, to Senators in the US Congress – though those scales may not be that different) is able to process and to respond to the information it gleans from its environment. It then can realign itself with its network, which changes the network, which leads to further changes in the node, which leads to further changes in the network. This dynamism in the network, or organism, is complexity. While this dynamism is usually regular, it is probabilistic rather than deterministic, even at the most elementary physical and chemical scales, and it is this element of chance that probably lead to the emergence of COMPLEXITY as the term of choice for naming it. It is also self-organizing, so that the few possible actions of any one ant can lead to quite sophisticated  behaviors of the ant colony. Such dynamic information processing can also lead to a sonnet, or a blog post.

Okay, this is what I mean by complexity, and I insist that it is at the heart of connectivism along with networking. I'll explore both concepts more in future posts.

Writing to Learn Connectivism

Stephen Downes was kind enough to comment on my last post, and that's a good thing. His comment brought a fair number of visitors to my blog, giving that post as many hits as any other I've written.

But alas, it seems that I was not very clear in what I was trying to say. Stephen complains that:

Keith Hamon ties himself in knots trying to reconcile essentialism and connectivism. And I don't think he helps himself adding DNA to the mix. "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.'" But there are many things for which essentialism is false. As Wittgenstein famously argues, consider the definition of 'game'. There's nothing essential to being a game. For every property you can think of - competition, rules, points - there are exceptions. Or consider membership in a family. People in a family resemble each other, but there is no one trait that their [sic] all share. What makes them a family is that they are connected, not that they share some essential trait. In many ways, connection replaces essentialism, and does not need to account for it.

Quite likely I did tie myself in knots in that post, though from my point of view, I was untangling a knot. I was trying to untangle an issue in my head, and now that I've done it, it is really quite straightforward, so let me now write the post I should have published.

I've been trying to define Connectivism without resorting to the essentialism and reductionism typical of most definitions, relying instead on complex, multi-scale networking to frame my definition (I was, in fact, replacing essentialism with connectivism). I had been using some language from Edgar Morin's book On Complexity, including the concept of DNA. Gradually, I realized that DNA as a concept could be too easily shaded with Essentialist overtones, and that would be problematic for my argument. So I wanted to see if I could show how Morin's concept of DNA does not necessarily imply Essentialism. I decided that DNA avoids essentialism in two ways:

1. it is a start point for an entity, not an end point, and
2. it is specific to one entity, not many.

That's a rather short post and likely would not have caught Stephen Downes' eye; however, I didn't have my conclusion when I started writing the post. I was just pulling at the tangle of thought until I had it unraveled, at least in my own mind.

The more interesting question now, though, is how did Stephen and I miscommunicate? It would be trite  to say merely that I didn't write well, or that Stephen didn't read well, or perhaps a bit of both. Is there a Connectivist explanation for this kind of communication where the meaning in the author's head does not seem to match closely enough the meaning in the reader's head? There should be. So let's sketch some outlines that might suggest how and why this communication fell out as it did.

First, keep in mind that this post is itself exploration rather than an explanation. I may be able to explain whatever emerges—if anything—more clearly later, but I can't now. Just now, I'm playing, pushing around some ideas that just might work, but no guarantees.

I'll start with what I was doing—my writing—mainly because I can speak with some authority about that. I've been writing for decades, and I've paid attention to how I write. I'll have to be far more general and speculative about Stephen's reading, as I don't know his particular reading habits.

I was writing the previous post in a writing to learn mode. This is one of two large modes of writing that I introduce to my students:

1. writing to learn, and
2. writing to communicate.

Perhaps you think that any writing loosed on the public, such as blog posts, should be writing to communicate, but I don't think this is the case. So what's the difference between the two? Writing to learn is mostly for ourselves while writing to communicate is mostly for others. It's a shift along a sliding scale rather than a shift in kind, however, but it is an important shift. When we are writing to learn, we are using writing as a tool for rendering explicit to ourselves what we know. When we are writing to communicate, we are using writing as a tool for engaging others.

In a connectivist sense, then, when I wrote my post I was using written language to externalize the patterns of thought in my mind. I was creating a text as an external artifact onto which I could arrange and play with my thoughts. The text, the post, became an other somewhat removed from me, with which I could converse. I would write a phrase or sentence, and then stop to read it, looking for a match between the patterns I felt, sensed, or thought in my mind and the patterns I read on the screen. Sometimes the sentence spoke back to me, or stained me, in a way that felt right, and I would keep the sentence, but more often than not, the sentence did not stain me in quite the right sense, and so I would change it. I would erase it and try again. Or sometimes, I would just leave it and move on to try again.

The post became, then, another node in the network of interactions that formed my thoughts about essentialism and DNA and connectivism, but it is a node with some peculiar affordances (thanks again, Bon) that renders thinking more productive in certain ways. First, it became an explicit thing, outside my head. This is of inestimable value. While a few people can structure and manage quite well the thoughts in their heads, most people, including me, lack that ability. My thoughts are too often jumbled—and when they are crystal clear, I seldom know why—and I can go over and over the same idea in my head without ever moving it forward, but as soon as I put it on screen or paper, then it seems to stabilize. It becomes an explicit, external object that I can work with. I can assess it's value, shape, and meaning, and decide whether or not it meets my needs. I too often find that hard to do in my head alone.

Then, the post became another node in the pattern of meaning that I was trying to create through my thinking and writing. As such, the post fed back into my head the thoughts that I had written, and those written thoughts began to interact with the mental thoughts, each affecting the other. I thought something, I wrote something, that fed back into my thoughts, and that fed back into my writing, over and over. It is a reiterative process that constantly maps back and forth, in and out, as the thoughts in my head feed into the thoughts on the screen which in turn feed back into the thoughts in my head. Each loop modifies the the internal and external thoughts, tweaking the patterns until I feel (it really is a feeling for me) an elegance and coherence between the text and the thoughts. The great rock guitarist Duane Allman used to speak of "hitting the note," of how he would play all night looking for that one note that pulled the whole performance together. That really is the feeling I'm looking for, and sometimes I have to write, or play, a long time before I find the pattern, or note, that pulls it together for me. It is the process that Deleuze and Guattari describe as cartography and decalcomania: a reiterative mapping between mind and reality, trying to shape the patterns in each in ways that are useful for ones life. I had to write a long time in that post to find out what I was trying to say. I had to play a long time to "hit the note."

This is writing to learn. And I think it is the part of writing that my students are most challenged by and least convinced of its value. It's also the part of writing this is too often least useful for readers, though its value for writers is inestimable.

This feedback loop, this mapping to use D&G's terms, is an integral part of Connectivism and Rhizomatic learning, I think. I know it is an important part of writing. It describes how we gaze upon the text and it gazes back at us. It describes how we push the text and it pushes back. Our thoughts feed into the text, and the text feeds back into our thoughts, and the loop continues round and round until we feel at peace somehow with the place that the text occupies in our thoughts. We come to terms with the text, our own creation, and we accept it as a fair node of the network that is our knowledge.

This does not mean, however, that the text is yet suitable for a reader. Quite likely it isn't. I'll talk more about writing to communicate next.

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.