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.

So, I guess my point is that before we invent a whole new way of talking about connectivism, we should try to use the tools that we already have for understanding how (and why) humans connect.