Networked learning under the Lens of Affordance 1

The notion of networked learning appeals to me, perhaps because I work to create courses about the subject of data communication (networking). Although I have a sense of what computer networks are, I was not foolish enough to assume that I knew what networked learning is. Good thing.

As we have learned, Affordance 1: Ubiquitous Learning is characterized by spatial boundlessness and atemporality. In common language, this is embodied by the notion of learning “any time and anywhere.” In essence, it is about access. The internet is a vehicle that enables ubiquitous learning. With it, Bangkok is as accessible as Boston and Kathmandu as available as Kansas City. When I first encountered the internet, I was amazed that I was accessing servers that were physically housed in Japan just as easily as I could access a site for a local news organization. The atemporal aspect of the internet is just as salient, it is always on, always available. The information it provides is available whenever it is required, on whim or necessity. However, until quite recently, we were bound by big, clunky desktop computers that kept us in our places as long as we had punched the clock. So, mobile computing has enabled ubiquity.

In order to complete this assignment, I struck out on my own to learn about my chosen topic: “networked learning” To do this I highlighted the terms on the assignment page, right-clicked, and chose “Search Google for….” And off I went. I went to Wikipedia, and skirted a couple of links to articles that I knew were only journal abstracts until I came to an EduCause paper called Networked Learning as Experiential Learning by Gardner Campbell. I sat there for awhile.

In discussing George Kuh’s High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter (excerpted here), Campbell states:

“…Kuh's "high-impact practices" sought to bolster and, in some cases, restore the idea of learning primarily as an adventure in discernment and self-actualization within a deeply relational social context, an adventure in synthesis and integration.”

What a good place to land!

Kuh described ten “high-impact” practices and their value to greatly increasing student engagement and success. Among these practices are first-year seminars, service learning, and undergraduate research. However, Kuh did not speak of the role of the internet. Of this, Gardner says:

“…we must add digitally mediated networked learning to Kuh's list, because the experience of building and participating within a digitally mediated network of discovery and collaboration is an increasingly necessary foundation for all other forms of experiential learning in a digital age. Moreover, the experience of building and participating within a digitally mediated network of discovery is itself a form of experiential learning, indeed a kind of metaexperiential learning that vividly and concretely teaches the experience of networks themselves.”

Ok, now I’m starting to feel it.

I read through the rest of the article and was taken by the author referring to metaphors for education (and many other things) that use ladders, or trees, as organizers. In a note he mentioned this:

“For an elegant exposition of the paradigm shift to networks, see the TED Talk by Manuel Lima, "A Visual History of Human Knowledge," TED2015, March 2015.”

I love videos like this.

Of course, we see in visual metaphors. Visual metaphors pattern what we see and then guide our seeing. If we see ladders, we see a hierarchies. If we see trees, we see a hierarchy of levels, a bit more egalitarian than ladders, because it is a hierarchy of equivalences. Here is where the network notion comes home. Lima discusses how the tree was the guiding metaphor for many different realities (taxonomies especially) for centuries. He makes a great argument that the tree is rapidly being replaced by the visual metaphor of the network.

As an aside, one of my professors was M. D. Merrill, a well-renowned educational psychologist and instructional technologist. He told me once that the dominant model of cognition seemed to be whatever technology was in use at the phone company switching center at the time.

I continued going from site to site, diving deeper into something interesting and new or searching for reinforcement of newly found ideas. Finally, I found my way to Tiago. Tiago is a PhD who I met while he was finishing his degree at the University of Maryland. I knew him years ago when we collaborated closely on a research project that became his dissertation. We met for dinner and drinks in Washington, D.C. while attending AERA 2016. I have not spoken with him for years. Why did I come to Tiago? Well, he is Portuguese, like Manuel Lima, and his research involved the use of processing mining to characterize the ways that students worked through a network configuration simulation that I had created. Networks of processes constructed while building networks of processes.

So from Wikipedia to the Educause paper, to a TED talk on visual metaphors, to papers on research on teaching computing, and so on, until Tiago.

This all leads up to networked learning theory. Networked learning theory basically concerns two networks that overlay one another – one is the network of connected information, the other is the network of connected learners. In networked learning, learning occurs through the process of building and interacting with the information networks and social networks that are situated within the learning space. The leaning space is not necessarily a physical space, although it could be in part. Instead, the networks exist as ubiquitous entities that transcend physical space and time and could extend well beyond the duration of any formal unit of instruction.

This process of creating this information web is fascinating and rewarding for me, however the process was solitary. I found myself longing to know who is reading what I am reading, and who has been to these sites and found them as wonderful as I have. I was feeling our deep need for the society of others, and specifically for the society of other pilgrims. So here are the two dimensions of networked learning; networked information, and networked learners. Unfortunately, the network of information is much easier to construct than the network of learners.

So I wondered how the process of building networks of content could join the process of building networks of other learners. Could there be a means of making the presence and process of others visible as each personal information networks is built? Also, how might one student’s (or a group of students’) previously built networks be preserved and shared with others?

I am running a browser history visualization plugin in Chrome. The network of websites that I have recently visited currently looks like this:

My Recent Browsing History as Kinetic Graph

Chrome extension from http://webhistorian.org/

This graph is dynamic and interactive. The nodes can be pulled apart for clarity, and each is hyperlinked to the source. The larger nodes have the most followed links. The paths are directed. When you move the nodes around the network resembles a living, swimming see creature. It has a kinetic quality.

Wouldn’t it be nice if such networks could be recorded and interactively navigated, enlarged, and shared? What if students could go their own way, and those paths preserved for others to explore?

What’s more, wouldn’t it be cool if consenting students agreed to permit their navigation of a network space to be visible to others and a system, so that a little data could be gathered, like the time spent on a link and perhaps some other indicators of activity. These measures could be aggregated into digestible labels representing constructs for levels of engagement such as (“just checking”,” took what I needed”, “engrossed”, or “this is a part of me”) either chosen by the student or generated by analytics. In addition, it would be very nice if there were some way to see who is on the same resource as you are right now, and be able to spin up a chat or web conference with that person in real time. Similarly, seeing who had been there before would be as valuable. Sort of like when I found Spiro Agnew’s daughter’s name on a the checkout card of a library book I found in elementary school.

What I propose is kind of like creating course or topic-related meeting rooms that people visit to learn. However, each resource, perhaps a seed network, in the room records traces of the students that have picked it up and used it. These traces are links that could join likeminded students socially, if they so desire. The social space, like other social networks, also links other learners independent of the information resource – friends of friends. The social network component would be totally devoted to a course or course topics, or a major or whatever, like a Facebook group. But the group would contain a pre-built and always growing network of information, a living metaphor of the shared, rated, and annotated artifacts of those who came before.