Up with Downes!
I once enter the world of programming many years ago with my Vic 20 and my COCO 28 (Radio Shack). Did some work with LOGO at the high school. Then GUI came along…. praise the Mac Classic.
Then Mr. Downes shows his customized tools for collecting feeds of various types, organizing, creating, etc. and I wonder why I left the coding world. However I take comfort in his belief in open source and that knowledge should be free to all….. I just hope his plan to release his “reader on steroids” is a little more user friendly for us illiterate coders.
I found his slideshare presentation on networks vs groups excellent and thought provoking. My sister-in-law and brother-in-law work in the area of business, and often refer to their attendance at conferences and lunches as “networking”. Yet when they collaborate on a project with their peers, they work in groups.
Institutions, such as schools and businesses, thrive on the group model, assigning roles and tasks to individuals; part of our best practice in teaching.
So what about networked collaboration when there is a time frame involved? Personal learning certainly is affected because of these constraints, do they not?
1.) Is networking or groups the best approach to problem solving in terms of effective, time based outcomes, or for personal informal learning experiences? Does the concept of timed outcomes within a network destroy the concept of a network?
2.) Can a group model maintain some of it’s positive aspects (time frames, for example) and still maintain some characteristics of a network? If so, what would it look like?
I hope I have expressed myself clearly. I may be attempting to re convey my meanings in the next short while!
Thoughts.
