Educator and eLearning Specialist

Talking with Toddlers

Please feel free to download and distribute to any who would benefit from this book. The pdf says it's protected by traditional copywrite, but I've released it under the Creative Commons license described below the document.

Humans and Technology

In reading some of the background and introductory materials for the CCK08 course, I'm struck again how it doesn't matter how far you run, there you are. In particular, it doesn't matter how much technology you layer on top of human behavior, human behavior is still the thing you have to understand to know what's happening.

This response stems from the discussion about the definition of "connectivism." The suggestions are all over the map, and to my mind, don't get to the interesting questions that have to do with human nature. For example, the point about having so many nodes on a network requiring some sort of new vocabulary to understand or requiring a new epistimology to conceptualize. In fact, humans have been navigating this kind of territory, well, for as long as we've been humans. This is entirely understandable in terms of social cognition where your very survival depends on understanding your relationship with every other individual (node) in the tribe (network), and not only that, but understanding the relationship between every individual and every other individual. This is probably one of the biggest factors in causing humans to evolve such things as language, altruism, cheater detection, etc.

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course.

I'll be using this blog as a workspace for an online course I'll be taking over the next 12 weeks. Here's a link to the course description, if you're interested.