I am not yet ready for the examples required by Eric Duval’s two challenge questions. Instead, I still think about Jenny’s question whether “leveraging abundance is desirable and will lead to better learning”.
I think the main point for abundance is that it may foster diversity (1), under certain preconditions:
- openness (2),
- some New Critical Literacies are needed, in particukar, the skills of picking and of trust (but these are also reinforced by practicing with the abundance);
- autonomy (3), not only for picking, but also for turning one’s passion into depth (and together with the other new Critical Literacies, it fosters Independent Thinking which, in turn, reinforces autonomy);
- Connectedness (4), the fourth connectivist principle, is also needed if passion shall lead to depth of learning.
Abundance offers the best chance to generate a true, authentic, random statistical kind of diversity which can finally lead to a representative, exemplary breadth of learning, because is destroys the illusion that one could still gain some comprehensive core knowledge, or some unbiased curated selection.
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This is a great post. The diagram is great and it makes obvious sense to frame a discussion about abundance in terms of diversity when thinking about connectivism. I’m assuming that the connectedness you are thinking about in point 4 is conceptual connectedness? I also like the fact that your diagram rests on a balance – which must mean that there are dangers for , for example, learner autonomy – if there is too much abundance.
I think the only thing that’s missing for me is consideration of something like privacy’ which was discussed in yesterday’s session with Erik Duval. Perhaps if the word passion was preceded by ‘individual, i.e. Individual Passion – it might help to make the balance between the individual and abundance clearer?
I am still thinking about implications for privacy in the light of yesterday’s discussion.
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As for connectedness, I thought of both the conceptual and the social type and their mixtures, while for openness, I am still not sure if “outgoing” openness should be required in a similar, unconditional way as “incoming” (open access and an open mindset), because of the privacy concerns.
I did not think about your further implications of the balance, and it’s great that readers’ interpretation of one’s post so often yield new thoughts for the writer!
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