Rowland’s Blog about e-learning matters

I was just randomly linking around between blogs when I came across a post on Connectivism and web2.0 on Sharon Peter’s blog. It has a direct link to a lecture by George Siemans which uses a combined slide show and voice over to present the lecture.

Sharon gives an excellent summary of the lecture on her post so I won’t repeat it here. I found the lecture very stimulating and I think it helped me to get to grips a little better with connectivism. However at the moment I can’t see that it is entirely inconsistent with social constructivism. If I understood what was said it was proposed that a learner has different perspectives on the same concept at the same time, the idea of placing themselves at different nodes in a network to view the same concept from a different angle.

As far as I am aware social constructivism allows for different perspectives on different concepts which might well contradict one another, at the same time and different perspectives on the same concept at different times. This is not quite the same thing but if you allow that the “different concepts” are really different aspects of the same concept then the two views become similar.

The other issue for me is whether understanding is a social group activity. I am happy with the notion of learning being so but less happy with understanding being other than an individual thing. Clearly I need to think about this a bit more.