I am listening to Will Richardson’s presentation on connected learning (also available here). One of his most salient points for me was on making connections and pattern recognition. He says (I tried to transcribe this accurately):
[…]recognizing patterns is huge.[…] it’s a skill that takes a lot of practice. […] recognizing patterns […] simply means being able to look at the distributed conversations that are happening about ideas out there. They’re not linear any more.
Richardson stresses the need to be able to synthesize ideas and pick out patterns to make sense of them. I think that Clarence Fisher does a good job of describing this pattern recognition:
Another skill that Will mentioned is that of pattern recognition; apophenia (also the name of a blog by Danah Boyd which you should be reading); the ability to find patterns in streams of data. Signal vs. noise. When students are aggregating streams of content in many forms, from many sources each day, the ability to lift out certain pieces from that stream to examine them further, or to simply tag them as important to their understanding of an issue is a skill to consider. It is essential information management that has yet to make it into classrooms in any wide spread form. Understanding that a picture from flickr goes with that blog post, which built on a podcast from last week and a comment before that is a difficult, mature understanding of how content is created, distributed, and built upon.
Richardson also calls the Internet “a ubiquitous learning environment,” which I think is somewhat accurate, but also problematic (the time I spent on Facebook is barely learning).
The mp3 cuts off for me before finishing (which was a shock, since I downloaded it, so it suddenly went from Will Richardson’s voice to hard punk music on my iTunes), but he was ending by discussing how learning online is all “passion-based,” which I agree with when it is self-sponsored. I think that Konrad Glogowski offers a good discussion of this idea of student passion.
EDIT: I guess because I downloaded it, it didn’t all get downloaded. If you listen to it through the browser (at least the second link above), it should all play.
Richardson noted some of the obstacles in the way of changing the way we teach: fear of change, technology, and transparency; lack of time (to reflect, collaborate, publish, etc.); and getting outside the “comfort zone of content”; lack of access; passive cultures; and lack of understanding about some technologies.
Richardson encourages teachers to think about and change the way they learn. How do you learn and make connections? “How are you building your network? […] How are you modeling your learning?”
