I have a total of 199 results from the survey. You can view the results here (the tables simply won't display in Blogger - some weird default or script, I know not what).

I received many text comments as well, the vast majority of which said things to the effect: don't change anything.

This is a few weeks ahead of when we will be looking at this in the course, but I wrote is as a response to a discussion post today and so I'll post it here now.

> Could we separate out some issues?

OK, this post raises a number of great points. Let me work through them.

> 1. Is it not the case that if we respect: autonomy, diversity, openness and interactivity in any form or structure, its difficult to misuse power, but that's the case by definition?

It is so by definition only if the definition of 'power' is something like 'the limitation of autonomy, diversity, etc...' And I'm not sure people woul want to define power that way. Usually power is defined not just as type of limiting behaviour, but also as a type of effective behaviour, that is, people wield their power to cause some sort of outcome.

Maybe it can be so by the definition of 'autonomy', 'diversity', etc? This isn't clear. Clearly not for diversity. The cells in a leaf or the atoms in a lump of lead are all the same, but not by virtue of some sort of power. So non-diversity does not entail power. Similarly with non-autonomy. A pilot fish follows a shark around, or a barnacle attaches to the hull of a ship and goes where the ship goes - this is non-autonomous behaviour, but not a power relationship.

Interestingly, I think that because we define 'power' as the capacity to some sort of intervention, we can't have 'power' without at least the possibility of autonomy, diversity, etc., if not the actual existence of them. The wielding of power is the violation of autonomy, diversity, etc., which means it is wielded in a situation where autonomy, diversity, etc., would normally be expected.

What, then, would make it difficult to wield power is not simply the existence of autonomy, diversity, etc., but rather, the degree to which they are entrenched - how stuubornly autonomous individual entities are by nature or temperament, how 'power-wielding' form of contact or interaction are available through the connections in a given network, the nature and inclination of given entities to wield power, etc., the number of connections (and therefore the extnt of power) that may be forged, etc.

This gives us a way of describing different types of networks in term of the degree to which power may be wielded in those networks. For example:

- person-to-person network: communication is exercised by physical contact, power can b wielded as the direct application of force leading to injury and possible fatality, versus
- electronic network: communication is exercised by electronic message, power can be wielded only by means of changing opinions through rhetoric or reason

Or:

- person-to-person network: communication only to people who are physically proximate, and therefore limited to a maximum audience of several thousand (tens of thousands with voice amplification), versus
- broadcast (radio or television): communication to people with receiver, limited only by the number of people that exist

> 2. What is it particularly about networks that tends to enhance autonomy etc? Or is it the case that networks inevitably enhance autonomy etc?

I don't think there's anything particularly about networks that tends t enhance autonomy, etc.

What it is about networks is that properties such as autonomy become important in a way they didn't before. This is why I distinguished networks from groups.

In groups, the properties of autonomy, diversity, etc. tend to be thought of as inhibiting the function of the group. Notice how the person who has a different point of view, or who has different objectives ("their own agenda") are depicted as obstacles to be overcome.

Nothing inherently in a network fosters autonomy, etc. and, depending on its make-up, a network can be used equally to promote or to eliminate autonomy. That is why it is possible for a network to effectively collapse into a group.

A reworking of this question would be, why are autonomy, etc., important? And I have tried to answer this in An Introduction to Connective Knowledge and elsewhere. Networks in which these values are promoted are robust, dynamic, stable, reliable - they are good knowledge engines. We can rely on them (the way we rely on scientific explanation and induction, as methodological paradigms, tweaked and adjusted over time).

Another way of stating the same thing is that networks in which autonomy, etc., are abridged are effectively dying. The resonation of connections from entity to entity will gradually cease. The network gradually becomes inert. If all entities are the same, there is nothing for them to communicate to one another. The network is dead - a dead lump of coal (100% carbon) rather than a living, breathing plant or animal.

> 3. The internet allows, and enhances all sorts of behaviours: grooming for child pornography and abuse, and for the grooming of disabled adults for terrorism, just for starters. Giving a child, or a disabled adult the autonomy to connect to anyone else on the Internet, within diversity, openness and interactivity is clearly a disaster.

I don't think any of this is an argument against either the internet or networks.

First of all, the internet does not increase the possibility of exposure to these elements. Child abuse was common before electronic media - maybe even more common. The grooming of average civilians for military purposes was also common; witness the Crusades.

Second, internet technologies tend to make these things less dangerous, not more dangerous. Child abusers and terrorists cannot use the internet to impose direct control the way they can in person. You cannot kidnap a child or harm someone's relatives online - you have to do it in person.

Third, the best defense against the ills of society is not sheltering, but exposure. It is the things children (and adults) have never seen before that really hurt them or kill them. Children who have been exposed have a better chance of survival, and if this exposure happens in a safe environment, such as the internet, so much the better.

Fourth, exposing children to the diverse nature of society shows them how rare some of these phenomena are. While broadcast television hammers into them the incorrect notion that violent crimes are prevalent and increasing, exposure to actual people shows the wide diversity of (mostly nice) people.

All of this is, in essence, an argument to the effect that network responses are a better remdy to the ills outlined in the comment than group responses. One of the most striking images I have of my visit to South Africa was of the walls that are everywhere. But nowhere were people less safe. Huddling together with people of your own kind, keeping those you fear at bay with fences and security and police, makes you less safe. You have the illusion of control - but it's only an illusion.

4. So, can we distinguish:

a. Generic affordances of networks

That's a good one. Autonomy, diversity, openness and connectedness are not properties o networks generically, they are properties of good networks.

I confess I don't have a systemic list of the generic affordances of networks. I would be inclined to put things like 'pattern creation' and 'emergent properties' as the generic affordances. But I would have to think about it.

b. Distortions and misuses of networks

This is where I would place non-autonomy, non-diversity, etc.

c. The ethics and memes of positive social networks, and the value systems within which we make those judgment calls?

This should be the subject of a much larger discussion. So I will only attempt a summary of my views here.

First, there is a significant distinction to be drawn between personal ethics and public ethics (analogous to the distinction between personal knowledge and public knowledge).

Personal ethics (aka personal morality) is an emergent property of your own self (your own brain, your own body, whatever). Personal morality is like a sensation - it is based in what we in this course have been calling the passions, it is a feeling for what is right and what is wrong. Though reason and argumentation can augment it, as Hume says, "reason is, and must be, the slave of the passions." In morality especially, if you don't feel that something is good, it can never be believed by you to be good.

The arguments we see in ethical texts - from Kant's description of the categorical imperative to Mill's utilitarianism to Sidgwick's methods - are, to my mind, rationalizations of the ethical impulses we feel as individuals. They are attempts to explain and justify the ethical values we already possess - and it is worth noting that such writings are singularly unconvincing to pople who do not feel the same way.

Such ethics can be taught, and a person's personal ethics are very often a reflection of their parents' ethics. But the manner of teaching is not to tell a child how to behave, but rather, to model and demonstrate ethical behaviour, which the child will practice, and reflect upon (forming ethical principles in his or her own mind as massive sets of connections between neurons formed via the principles of association).

Public ethics is the mechanism though which personal ethics are reflected in society as a whole. In essence, each person in a society is thought of as an ethical agent - an individualized sensor of ethical knowledge.

In terms of content, public ethics are whatever they are. What I man by that is that they are the emergent ethical properties that are produced though the interactions of a viable social network. We ma make various attempts to formulate them, but such attempts will be invariably limited by context and abstraction - they will be partial representations of a much richer phenomenon. The legal system is one such partial representation - it is an attempt to codify and prescribe punishments for serious ethical violations. Yet nobody would equate the legal system with the complete set of social ethics, an few people, if any, adopt the legal system as their own personal definition of ethics.

As such, and crucially, what constitutes ethical behaviour with respect to the creation of the social ethic is equivalent to whatever produces the best, most robust, richest, most reliable, and most reasonable social ethic. Behaviours that promote the development of such a social ethioc are ethical, behaviours that inhibit it are unethical.

Another way of putting the same point is what while personal ethics govern how we conduct our lives as individuals, social (or public) ethics govern how we interact with each other. Our motivations for acting in one way or another can and will be very different; what a public ethic amounts to is (roughly) the rules of engagement with each other - or, as Wittgenstein might say, the ethics game, or as computer scientist might say, protocols for a network infrastructure (the IETF and the W3C protocols are not standards, they are a set of protocols for ethical behaviour - that is, behaviour that best leads to the effective functioning of the internet, so far as we know).

What amounts to ethical behaviour, on such an account, is (very roughly) what amounts to reasonable or polite behaviour. In my own thinking, I identify different domains depnding on the different types of interaction. For example:

- principles of argumentation - ethical behaviour is rational behaviour - we interact using reason, rather than attempting to intimidate with force, we argue clearly and honestly, rather than attempting to misrepresent or fool through trickery. These principles align with qualitative knowledge.

- principles of explanation - we favour theories and mechanisms that are testable, that are robust, that apply in a wide range of disciplines; we reject explanations and mechanisms based on incomplete or misrepresentative information; we favour simplicity. These principles align with quantitative knowledge.

- principles of networking - we favour networks in which the entities are autonomous; we promote networks of diverse entities; we prefer networks that are open and undefined; and we prefer networks that produce knowledge as an emergent property, rather than mere repetition of some poperty or state of an individual entity. These principles align with connective knowledge.

d. Appropriate ways of regulating networks - both socially and ethically appropriate, and network/CAST (complex adaptive systems theory) appropriate, assuming that regulation of complex systems is not the same as regulation of predictable systems (see Kurtz and Snowden).

The connotation of 'regulation' is that it is the moderation of behaviour through a projection of power.

My reaction to that is that I have never seen an effective regulation through projection of power.

That is not to say that projections of power cannot prevent particular instances of prohibited behaviour. That is not even to say that the application of a significant amount of power cannot prevent most instances of a prohibited behaviour. Police states, whatever their faults, result in less crime. For a time.

If you convert your network into a perfect group, you will have achieved group identity, and hence, perfect regulation. At the cost of killing the network.

Mechanisms based on projections of power are temporary and ineffective, and that they will fail in the long run.

Ethical behaviour cannot be imposed. It can be enforced, but cannot be produced through the use of force.

Only behaviour that is freely chosen can become ethical behaviour, because only such behaviour can be relied upon even in the absence of constraint or force. Only such behaviour will survive the breakdown of social order. Only such behaviour will permit the rebuilding of a society in the event of disaster.

Such behaviour is not created by power, regulation or force, it is taught, and such behaviour is not taught by telling, it is taught by modeling and demonstrating ethical (read: 'reasonable') behaviour.

Regulations are a short-term mechanism intended to cope with a failure of teaching. Regulations are effective only for the perpetuation of a status quo while alternative teaching can effect long-term and substantial change.

All of that said - the practical question is, how should I, as an ethical actor, with an interest in promoting an ethical network, approach instances of unethical behaviour (defined for now as behaviour that would normally prompt calls for 'regulation').

And the answer, in a nutshell, is to make ethical behaviour a condition for network interaction. Ethical protocols are voluntary, and you can do something else if you want, but nobody will talk to you if you do not behave ethically.

This is something you cannot impose - you cannot effectively isolate a person from a network, because it has no boundaries. However, individual entities can refuse to connect with non-compliant entities. And this refusal to connect is something that can be modeled (and, more importantly, the conditions under which non-connection occurs) can be modeled.

That said, it should be understood that these are two gradations, not on-off absolutes. A person's behaviour can be more or less reasonable (as defined above) and a response to that behaviour can be more or less exclusionary. There is room for moderation of response, and moderation of response is encouraged. The network principle "be generous in what you accept, strict in what you send out" applies here: it is better to encourage reasonableness by demonstrating it, but the effectiveness of demonstrating it exists only if communications are undertaken, at least some times, with people who are more or less unreasonable.

(I use the word 'people' but I actually intend to refer to 'entities' more generally.)

I may complain about Moncton sometimes, but I can't think of any city more beautiful than Moncton in the fall. This photo is of a pond just near my office, that I pass by every day.

The Pond by the Corner
Originally uploaded by Stephen Downes

To: CTV News
Subject: You call that an interview?

That was a pretty shabby tactic used in the interview with Stephane Dion today.

I am not a Liberal, but I recognize a hatchet job when I see one.

When someone asks you, "Can I start over," and you say "yes", it is an out-and-out lie if you then turn around and broadcast the false starts. It's just bad faith, and you should be ashamed of yourselves.

And what a stupid question - you are asking what Dion would do - but isn't important to know whether this is before or after the irresponsible tax cuts harper passed just before the crisis hit. It was a question that meant to be vague and misleading, and it is clear you were counting on a muddled response.

Shame on you. Irresponsible, yellow yellow journalism.

Dear Mr. Downes,

Thank you for your email. I would like to take a moment to respond to your concerns to give you a better understanding of why we aired the interview with Stephane Dion in its entirety.

The economic crisis is a central issue in the federal election campaign. We posed a question to Mr. Dion regarding the economy and while it was unfortunate that he struggled in answering the question, upon review and reflection it was decided that we had a responsibility to run the footage so that our viewers could decide for themselves.

We would like to emphasize that Steve Murphy is not personally responsible for this decision. CTV News has an editorial review process in place. There was a great deal of consideration and discussion that went into making this decision. This process also included numerous other people from various departments within CTV News, as decisions of this magnitude are never made in isolation. We assure you that we do not take these issues lightly.

Thank you for sharing your point-of-view, as feedback from our viewers is extremely important to us. We sincerely hope that you will continue to watch CTV News in the future.

Sincerely,
Jay Witherbee
News Director
CTV Atlantic

Hiya Jay,

The widespread condemnation your actions are receiving in other media (and, notably, not your own) is indication that you made the wrong call.

Dion's efforts to comprehend a confusing and poorly worded question were not news, and your airing of obvious outtakes normally left on the cutting room floor was not journalism.

In recent years, CTV News has increasingly begun to resemble Fox News in both tone and in balance. I will not be watching CTV News in the future if this trend continues.

-- Stephen

Based on my presentation to the e-Portfolios conference, May 6, 2008.

Abstract

In this address to the 2008 e-Portfolio Conference I consider the sorts of questions that might be asked about a student’s identity in an e-portfolio system and the factors that inform the answers to those questions. Rather than being answered with a simple physical presence, as we might have expected in the past, the question of identity in a digital space requires a complex answer, taking into account a person’s past and future states, as well as his or her motivations, desires and expectations. Accordingly, an identity is best thought of as a distributed profile, written by multiple authors and considering multiple questions, rather than a single fixed point on which attributes may be assigned.

Questions, Answers and Technology

One way to enquire about e-portfolios is to consider the questions raised by them. Consider, for example, some of the central questions on the subject of e-portfolios that center on identity. What is the self? What is the person? What are the capacities, the competencies of the person?

As Heidegger argues, any time there is a question, there are things that come with that question. (Heidegger, 1962) The first of these is that the thing that we’re inquiring about: whether it’s a nature, a capacity, ability, or skill. The second is the thing that we are asking that question of, “that which is interrogated.” We assume that we are asking the questions of the student, for example, but in fact, when we’re working with things like digital identities and digital portfolios our inquiry isn’t of the student, but of the body of work that we take to be representative of the student. And third, there’s always a presupposition when we make an inquiry of any sort about the sort of thing that we might get in response. If we ask for grades, we’ll get grades back. If we ask for capacities, we’ll get capacities back.

All of these things interplay in the nature of our enquiry. To see this, consider the technology that we’re dealing with. To borrow some comments from Helen Barrett, who cites Gary Brown, one aspect of e-portfolio technology is a shift from the idea that a learner takes a course from a particular institution or that a learner has a particular source or a particular authority that is teaching them or representing the state of the world to them. (Grush, 2008) More and more learning is happening online and, according to Brown, 50 percent of students are studying from multiple sources, multiple institutions, often at the same time. So the very idea that any system like a learning management system or an e-portfolio system as something that is created and managed by the institution seems in a way seriously misguided. If people are taking things from multiple institutions, then if we have an application that is a single point of reference for their learning, then that application must be of multi-institutional.

Brown also suggests that the ePortfolio is becoming or adapting to Web 2.0. The idea here is that the ePortfolio resembles less and less a content management systems (CMS) and is less and less a single place or location where students put all their work, and becomes more and more what is being referred to as a personal learning environment (PLE). The personal learning environment adapts, adopts and embraces Web 2.0 methodologies and in particular applications that can make inquiries of other applications using things like AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) and REST (Representational State Transfer) based technology. (O'Reilly, 2005)

And the three domains of inquiries come into play here. We need to know what we’re asking about. We need to know what we’re asking of. We need to know what we expect to get in return. When we define things like Asynchronous Javascript and XML, when we define Representational State Transfer, what we’re trying to do is understand the kind of questions one application can ask of another application. We are defining what we are asking for – a name, a value, a field? What we are asking it if – a website, a web service, a person? And what we expect in return – some text, some XML, an authentication?

E-portfolios involve distributed content. That is to say content that is located not in one place on the World Wide Web, not in one place on the internet, but rather in multiple locations. If you think about even your own web presence now, you have a Facebook account, where you keep your contacts; you have Google Docs, where you keep your essays; you have a Flickr account, where you keep your photos; a YouTube account, where you’ve uploaded your videos and your friends’ videos and stuff from TV. You have your website, your blogs, and all of the rest. These things are spread out across the internet and the whole idea of distributive profile is getting a picture of all of those things that are spread out all over the internet and thinking of them as one thing.

And these things allow people to collaborate and to communicate with each other, to form communities of users. For example, here is the widely cited diagram of a personal learning environment diagram that was actually created before anybody came up to the term personal learning environment (so it says ‘future VLE’ in there instead). It’s authored by Scott Wilson:

(Wilson, 2005) There have been numerous variations of this diagram since, but the original is sufficient to demonstrate the distributive nature of the concept. Wilson describes links to 43 Things for your task list, Flickr for your photos, Live Journal for your blogging posting, et cetera. And what makes the PLE the PLE is the way that communications takes place from entity to entity to entity. Thus Wilson describes the various protocols – RSS, FOAF, Atom – these sites use to communicate with each other.

So e-portfolios built using these - these representations of the self that are out there in the world - are not simply static artifacts. They are actually conversations – series of questions and answers - that you have with the rest of the world. That’s the kind of technology, the kind technological environment that we’re looking at.

What We Think About Identity

In this environment, then, what can we say about identity? It seems that with the use of digital communications, the question of identity changes. Identity used to be ontological problem. It used to be a question about being. If you wanted to establish an identity, you would produce a body. That was identity: one person, one body. But on the internet we have a situation where we have identities without bodies. We might think that this doesn’t make sense, but it does, if we think about identity the way we think about it in everyday ordinary life.

What is the common conception of identity? As Heidegger notes, we’re born, we live, we die in time. And we have a certain presence in space. Heidegger should have called it “being (or space) in time.” (Arisaka, 1996) So we take up space. Some of us take up more space than others, but our identity does not begin and end there. We have a corpus, we have a body, but our identity is much more than just that. For example, Heidegger has a lot to say about the way the past plays a role in our identity. The past shapes who we are.

Think about two people with two identical properties? Two hockey playerers may have the property of having ‘scored 32 goals’, say. For one player, that’s a great achievement, the peak of his career. But for another player, it’s his career in decline. He’s going to have to retire now. The present is informed by the past; what we understand of the present entity is informed by that entity’s past states. And there’s also the future, what one could be. Our potential also defines who we are, in a certain sense. Our identity, in any sense of the word, is not merely a defined by a physical presence in an instant of time. Our identity spans dimensions, from past to future. And therefore, extends beyond the merely immediately physical.

Our identity extends beyond mere physical dimensionality in space as well. For example, in addition to the physical, we have what we might call, for lack of a better word, the ‘inner’, which can be contrasted with ‘the outer’, which is the rest of the world. We have not just our physical body and any physical extensions of the body – our reach, our property, our influence – that we might find in the outer world, but also our mental state – our hopes and dreams and habits and predilections. A change in the purely mental may quite rightly prompt us to say “He’s not the same person.”

And so what happens when we’re establishing identity, and particularly when we’re talking about identity on the internet, is that we’re talking about the projections of this self from here to these four dimensions (past and future, outer and inner).

That’s why it’s so difficult to make assertions about identity, particular when those assertions include assertions about the capacities or the competencies of the person. We have these divisions, not only between past and future, but also between, on the one hand, the things that we do in the world (actions), and on the other hand, the things that we think about the world (reflections). And the reason this is relevant is because a question of identity, a question of understanding what this person is, isn’t simply a point by point picking out of this sort of thing. It involves inferences and relations between the various aspects of identity. This inference is not straightforward; it is multidimensional and complex. (Blunden, 1996)

(Aside: Proponents of standardized testing haven’t accounted for this adequately. The problem is that testing measures only one dimension of something that is very complex. Consider Charles Ungerleider, who says things like, “The utility of CRLSAs for improving student achievement depends on the capacity for investigating relations among variables over which the system exercises control or is capable of exercising control.” (Ungerleider, 2003) This creates a very limited, very simple point of view, since most of what accounts for a student’s learning is outside the control of the evaluators. When we’re talking identity, we’re talking about the full scope of an identity, but when we’re talking about measuring – that is, trying to find causal relationships between variables – we are typically we’re talking about one dimension about it. And thus, if we represent it as the whole of an identity, misrepresenting it.)

Asking Questions About Identity

And so the study of identity has changed. If we go back to the world of Descartes it consisted of questions like “Who am I, what is my nature, what is my essential nature?” (Descartes, 1996) Today, questions of identities become (maybe it has to do with our bar culture and IDing yourself) how you can prove who you are to someone else. And notice the way the question has changed. Notice the way the asker of the question has changed. Notice the way the entity to which the question is being put has changed. It used to be that to identify yourself was very simple. You just stepped forward and the guard at the gate would recognize you. You just made a barrel, and people could see you know how to make barrels. Now, there’s no such way of doing that. You can’t stand forward and be recognized. You can’t simply demonstrate your skill or capacity. And so what was never questioned is now the central question.

It is important when questioning assertions of identity to draw out two distinct concepts. The first of these is identification - sometimes known as self identification - which is my assertion that I am a certain person. The second is authentication, which is the verification (presumably by a third party) that I am who I say I am. (Downes, 2005)

Identification is really kind of soft verification. It is us, asking of ourselves, who we are. Who am I? It’s essential to our being. When a person becomes amnesiac and they lose their memory, their first question is, “who am I?” As opposed to, “What is the capital of France?” Who they are: That’s what they want to know. And importantly my sense of self, my sense of identity defends crucially on my remembering who I am. And in a certain way, remembering what my aptitudes are. You cannot have identity in time without identity in history. Self-identification is self-memory.

I have different ways of describing who I am, and each different way I describe who I am corresponds to a different way of thinking about myself. I have a name. But my name is not sufficient to identify me. It is also the name of a restaurant critic in Melbourne, Australia. It is also the name of a political candidate in Nova Scotia, Canada. It is also the name of the cognitive psychologist who works at Utah. It is also the name of a football player in England. I need something more specific.

In identity there is a presumption of uniqueness and in order to establish uniqueness you need multiple naming systems. Some of them are more or less permanent, like your social security number. Others are transient and less permanent, such as your school number, phone number, PIN, and the like. The problem is that there are too many numbers. Nobody can remember them all. So we carry tokens with us – our credit cards, our bank cards, and the like. And that way we don’t need to remember all of these numbers. We just refer to the token.

It’s kind of funny; right? My tokens tell me who I am. If I didn’t have my tokens - if I didn’t have things that are external to me - I wouldn’t know who I am, because I wouldn’t be able to name myself.

What about authentication? How do I prove to someone that I am who I say I am? First of all, I have to know who I am. There is no authentication without identification. There’s no way I can prove to you that I am who I say I am unless I can say to myself I am who I am.

The Failure of Authentication

Consider the two major cases of identity claims that are made in context of authentication: where self-identification is accurate, and where it is not. First of all, I am Pete when I am Pete. It’s an accurate or correct identity claim, and if that’s the case everything’s fine and we don’t need to worry. The problematic chases when I say I am Pete when in fact I am not Pete, I am someone else. How do I prove that I am or am not Pete? If I can’t present the body I’m going to present the token. And if it’s a case of online authentication, I’m going to present a digital token, something like a password or a PIN or something like that.

But there is nothing inherently in the token that establishes the authenticity of my identity claim. A PIN is just a PIN. Only when a PIN is seen or used in a certain context is that an identity claim. There’s nothing in the PIN itself. Think about the example of the bank machine. I give my card, which is the physical token, and my pin number, which is the digital token, to my wife and I say, “Go get me a hundred dollars.” She goes to the bank presents the card, presents the ID number, gets a hundred dollars. There’s nothing inherent in the presentation of the card and the ID number that establishes that that person is who they claim to be.

So there’s nothing in the claim itself that prevents it from being a false claim. This is very important, because what is means is in the end no system of authentication ever succeeds. This is the conclusion of the famous Microsoft Darknet paper. (Peter Biddle, 2002) By ‘succeeds’ I mean establishing to a sufficient degree of certainty that my claim to be Pete is in fact true. Now, the standard will vary, but we can take very stringent standards and very loose standards, the result ends up the same.

Consider how we authenticate. Typically we rely on the testimony of a third party. Look at my tokens again – one is authenticated by the bank, another is authenticated by the government, another is authenticated by Costco. But how do they know I am who I am? Well, typically I went to them and said, “I am so and so” and maybe presented to them some other tokens. When you have a case of testimony from a third party, you basically created the same problem, but another iteration down, particularly in an online environment. Where now instead of proving I am who I am to the one place, I’m proving that I am who I am to another place, and using that proof to establish my proof here. There are all kinds of ways of misrepresenting myself. And even then even if I have proved to the satisfaction of someone that I am who I am, if I give my cards to somebody or if somebody steals my cards, and my pin numbers, they can still claim to be me even if they are not me.

The problem is essentially there is no token that is unique to me and that I can’t share - other than my own body, which I can’t share by definition. There is no token that I can present that is establishes that I am the young shadow of the doubt. It just does not exist.

The typical response is to propose some sort of biometric system, that is, to use a property of the body to establish identity. But the body – and other proxies, such as your computer, your telephone, like your mobile phone, the chip in your computer - can still all in some way be shared. The theme of many gruesome movies is that they cut the guy’s hand or they gouge out the guy’s eye in order to fool a biometric system. Biometrics depends on some kind of signature, and that signature is presumed to be unique to the body that carries that signature. But since it’s a signature, since it’s a type of sign, and not the actual entire body itself, it can always be spoofed.

This is especially the case if I am the person who is doing the spoofing. We typically think of false claims where somebody is claiming to be me, but what if I am me, but I want somebody else to be me? Suppose my thumbprint opens that door; I’ll unlock the door, and then I’ll send you through it. I’ve defeated the biometrics because I, the owner of the token (my thumb), used it to deceive. This is exactly what comes up in examinations and testing, when it’s in my interest to have someone who is not me write the test.

Trust and Motivation

Identity and authentication depends on motivation. They depend on me not wanting somebody else to self-identify as me. That’s why bank cards work. Bank cards work not because they’re super duper security – they are basically a simple password system, no more secure in a certain sense than a website – but because of my desire not to have the entire world able to withdraw funds from my bank account. Even biometrics depend on the bearer’s motivation to keep the lock secure, on me not wanting somebody else to be able to successfully pose as me.

In fact, when we talk about trust, our idea of trust is exactly backwards from the way it should be. We typically talk about trust in terms of authentication, in terms of whether I can prove my identity to someone else’s satisfaction. (Crocker, 2008) But what we should be talking about is whether I can trust the resource provider. Can this system establish to my own satisfaction that - I and only I - can establish that I am who I am? Are my identity assertions in this system uniquely my own?

This issue becomes especially evident when we look at the wider sense of identity, when we think of identity not just as a name or a number but rather as the complex set dimensions described at the beginning of this paper. If identity is not just a name, but rather, a four-dimensional array of properties, then the task becomes one of my being able to ensure that the properties – or at least, descriptions of those properties – are uniquely my own. And it is indeed this question of trust is brought forward in very sharp relief on the internet of today. Governments share our data. Companies share our data. Other people share our data.

Sometimes people impersonate these agencies in order to steal our data. Sometimes they simply sign legal agreements, or acquire the company, in order to obtain the data. Every year, thousands of people are victims of identity theft. (Canada, 2008) When agencies impersonate the entities that we can trust in order to steal our identities and use them for their own purposes, we lose the assurance that our identity claims are uniquely our own. We lose the assurance that claims made about us are true. And it is arguably this, rather than authentication, that the barrier to identity creation on the web today.

We need to establish a system whereby a person owns his or her own identity, where the projections that this person makes out to the world are verifiably, to the satisfaction of the person (not an external agency) reliably the property of that person. Or in pragmatic technical terms, if a blog post out there on my account has my name on it, it had better be something that I wrote and not something that has been put there in place of something that I wrote. We see that all the time people attempting to steal blog accounts in order to insert spam. This is exactly an instance of the sort of trust that we need to be able to establish: me being able to establish that my content, and not spam content, will go on my blogs, will be delivered using my email address, will represent my work, or my competences.

So identity needs to be understood from the perspective of our objectives, needs to be understood from the perspective of potentials of actions that we want to take, needs to be understood from the perspective of, as Terry Anderson says, how I manage my own presence. (Terry Anderson, 2001) How I manage who I am out there on the internet.

The way this is currently being done in practice on the internet is through a system called OpenID. (OpenID, 2007) In OpenID, a person’s identity is essentially a website and people verify this identity by putting something on the website. This is how Technorati verifies ownership of web logs. Somebody a signs up for Technorati and Technorati gives them unique token. They log in and put that token on their blog. Thus, they have proven that they own the website in question. (Technorati, 2005) OpenID works in the same way, except that the process is automatic. Instead of a name and a password, I give a website URL, and I’m redirected, with a token, to that URL. Some software on my website accepts the token and sends me back to the original website, which checks my URL for an instance of the token.

OpenID is not a system of authentication. Indeed, that was the subject of criticisms. (Johnson, 2007) You are not proving to Yahoo that you are whoever you say you are. You are proving to Yahoo only that you control this website. So there’s no presumption of uniqueness. There’s no presumption of a physical body. The only thing that there is a presumption of is that you control this site. It’s self identification. It works because you are motivated to maintain your own identity. This is not some trusted authority. This is not some identity provider or registry system. There is no registry system at all. This is you. This is your projection of your digital identity on the web. And your motivation is your desire to maintain the integrity of the content on these sites you maintain, your desire to maintain control and ownership of them.

Identity and Resources

Let’s take some of these concepts and apply them to e-portfolios, to the way we attempting to describe resources. So here is a resource. It is out here in the world somewhere. And the question is how do we describe this resource? We need to be able to describe this resource in the case of the portfolios because this is the expression of one’s external self, the token that we are going to use in order to show that we have a competence or whatever, whatever. But the way we typically think of describing these resources is through metadata, and the presumption here is that this metadata will be in accurate or true description of this resource. The big problem is metadata lies. Just as a token does not establish identity, metadata does not establish content. The sign signifies, but does not verify, the entity.

People lie in their metadata. If you looking at learning object metadata you see a perfect example of it. One of the fields in learning object metadata is “interactivity”, and it turns out they all are highly interactive. Even plain text web pages are all interactive. Everything in the world is interactive. According to metadata.

What we want to think about now are the different types of metadata that are attached to different types of resources. For any given resource there will be different types of metadata: bibliographical, technical, classification, et cetera. Think for example of a photograph versus a video. A video has a runtime in seconds, 43 seconds say. A photo does not. And it doesn’t even make sense to think of a photograph of having a certain runtime. So different metadata attaches to different types of objects.

What we think we know about that type of object is expressed by the metadata that we apply to it. Essentially in this sort of world there are three kinds of metadata. (Downes, Resource Profiles, 2004)

First party metadata is that created by the author of a resource. First party metadata is typically bibliographical metadata describing the author, the creation date, the location, and the like. It may also include rights metadata. And it includes technical metadata specific to the type of resource being described.

Second party metadata is metadata created by the user, or through the use, of a resource. It might be, for example, an evaluative metadata, containing the sort of criticism we would never see in first party metadata. Second party metadata may thus seem to be more accurate. But not necessarily; people lie about other people’s stuff too. Second party metadata is best thought of as usage metadata: who used it, when it was used, in what context it was used, what people said about it, and such.

Third party metadata is metadata created by people who neither created nor used the resource, by people who are describing it or classifying it for some purpose. “This is a resource about physics,” says the bibliographical association of America. “This is a resource that is appropriate for our students,” says the Latter Day Saints Association of America.

As these different types of metadata get produced by different people we get what might be called a profile of the resource composed of that metadata.

So what does this have to do with identity?

Exactly the same thing happens for people. If you think about it, think about the lifecycle of a resource or the lifecycle of a person it comes down to the same thing. You were born. I was born. When I came into this world I had very little metadata. I had almost none, in fact. I had a birth date, and I had a location of birth. A little while later I began to accumulate more metadata. I got named. That didn’t happen until after it took a few days. And then as time goes by I accumulate more metadata. I get grades in school. I have a brush with the law. I joined Boy Scouts. All of these things produce metadata, and this metadata is stored in different places. Some of the metadata is with the school. Some of the metadata is with the police service. Some of the metadata is with the university. It’s distributed all over the place.

So the idea of generating a resource profile – the idea of creating an identity, whether for a person or a resource - is pooling this metadata together. A person persists through time and space, projects through time and space. In the same way, and for much the same reasons, resources also persist and project through time and space. Different people with different needs and different perspectives may pool different bits of information, from different sources. A prospective romantic partner will be interested in different properties of an individual than will a prospective employer.

Summation

And thus, we return to Heidegger. Because no matter how we think of portfolios and identity, we need a more nuanced understanding of the three basic questions he describes.

First, we need to consider carefully what we are asking about. If we ask for something simple and one-dimensional – a grade, say, or a token – then that is what we will receive in response. But a person’s identity – and the picture of their skills and capacities, their motivations and their attitudes – is more complex, consisting of properties that extend well beyond the merely physically present.

Second, we need to consider who we are asking. This is not simply a matter of which person we are asking. It also depends on the attitude of the person to the question. Even something as simple as personal identification depends on the willingness of the person to cooperate, on there being an appropriate motivation to perform, and on their trust in you. And even then, we want to ask different kinds of questions of different individuals.

And third, we need to consider who is asking the question – what they can see and cannot see, what they want and do not want, what they expect and do not expect. There is not and cannot be a single view, a single story, on any given person, because the person is not just the thing that you see in front of you. We must understand that what we ask is not what defines the person in question, that we can at best achieve an approximation of an identity that is inherently compex.

Arisaka, Y. (1996). Spatiality, Temporality, and the Problem of Foundation in Being and Time. Philosophy Today , 40 (1), 36-46.

Blunden, R. (1996). The Mind Dependency of Vocational Skills. Journal of Vocational Education & Training , 48 (2), 167-188.

Canada, P. C. (2008, April 15). Identity Theft: What it is and what you can do about it. Retrieved August 1, 2008, from Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada: http://www.privcom.gc.ca/fs-fi/02_05_d_10_e.asp

Crocker, D. (2008, March). Trust in Email Begins with Authentication. Retrieved August 1, 2008, from Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG): http://www.maawg.org/about/publishedDocuments/MAAWG_Email_Authentication_Paper.pdf

Descartes, R. (1996). Meditations on First Philosophy. (J. Cottingham, Trans.) cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Downes, S. (2005). Authentication and Identification. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning . http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Oct_05/article01.htm

Downes, S. (2004). Resource Profiles. Journal of Interactive Media in Education , 5. http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/2004/5/downes-2004-5-disc-t.html

Grush, M. (2008, February 27). The Future of Web 2.0: An interview with WSU's Gary Brown. Campus Technology .

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. (J. Macquarrie, & E. Robinson, Trans.) Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Johnson, M. (2007, february 23). The OpenID Buzz: The good and the bad. Retrieved August 1, 2008, from Techzoogle: http://techzoogle.com/the-openid-buzz-the-good-and-the-bad/

OpenID. (2007). Retrieved August 1, 2008, from OpenID: http://openid.net/

O'Reilly, T. (2005, September 30). What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. O'Reilly .

Peter Biddle, P. E. (2002). The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution. 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management. Washington DC: Microsoft.

Technorati. (2005). Hey bloggers: Claim your blog! Retrieved August 1, 2008, from Technorati: http://technorati.com/weblog/2005/11/58.html

Terry Anderson, L. R. (2001). Assessing teaching presence in computer conferencing transcripts. Journal of the Asynchronous Learning Network , 5 (2).

Ungerleider, C. (2003). Large-Scale Student Assessment: Guidelines for Policymakers. International Journal of Testing , 3 (2), 119-128.

Wilson, S. (2005, January 25). Future VLE - The Visual Version. Retrieved July 28, 2008, from Scott's Workblog: http://zope.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=20050125170206

This pretty much says it for me

The Conservatives minor tax cuts will accomplish little or nothing. Tax cuts are only beneficial in an economy where incomes are stable or rising and companies are turning profits. If companies are losing money and Canadian workers are losing jobs cutting their taxes will have no impact on them whatsoever. All of the other parties are promising green jobs, infrastructure rebuilding (which is long past due and will create jobs) and other programs that will stimulate the economy and make it more attractive to international investment and trade. Stephen Harper's agenda does none of this.

Source: publicbroadcasting.ca

The selection of journalists in Google's new 'Power Reader' Canadian Politics newsfeed is so blatantly conservative someone must be paying off Google.

On the Atilla scale (*):

• 10

  Andrew Coyne
  
  

  Journalist, AndrewCoyne.com
• 3

  Richard Madan
  
  

  Political Reporter, City News
• -3

  Peter Mansbridge
  
  

  Chief Correspondent, CBC News
• 0

  Kady O'Malley
  
  

  Columnist, Macleans.ca
• 8

  Stephen Taylor
  
  

  Fellow, Manning Centre for Building Democracy

Come on Google, get serious with the political blogs. Include a few people who are to the left of Atilla the Hun.

(0 = Atilla the Hun, most of us are in negative digits, far to the left. Positive digits are to the right of Atilla the Hun)

“Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

This is John McCain.

If you're going to have a private sector health care system - which is a questionable choice to begin with - then it would be sheer lunacy to deregulate it.

Quote via Joho.

So, I guess, now, the whole idea of a deregulated financial market is pretty much discredited. Right?

I picked up this column from Andrew Krystal in my aggregator this evening, but when I went to respond on his blog website - nothing. The column was gone, like it had never existed. And you have to figure it's down because someone made him take it down.

Overall, I think his major point - that CTV has a Conservative bias - is accurate. But I completely disagree when he says that local CTV newscaster Steve Murphy is objective. He should hear the howls of protest when Murphy takes a decidedly right-wing slant on the issues "around here."

Anyhow, for those who missed it - and I'm guessing that would be everybody - here's Andrew Krystal's full column, brough to you through the magic of RSS syndication:

Why CTV has sold its soul to the Conservative party

This is a presentation for Week Two of the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course. It expands on the ideas in Part a of my paper, An Introduction to Connective Knowledge.

1.

What can we know about an object? Historically, we have had two types of knowledge:

First, 'qualitative' knowledge. What colour the object is, for example. What the object is shaped like. What sort of sound it makes. Qualitative knowledge is knowledge typically derived from the senses. The things we see, the things we feel, the things we hear: these are the qualities of the object.

Second, 'quantitative' knowledge. How many things do we see, for example. How much do they weigh? What are their dimensions? Quantitative knowledge is derived from the practices of counting and measuring. Quantitative knowledge gives us a knowledge that is deeper than that gained merely from the senses. It gives us an insight into the nature of the objects through concepts like mass, atomic number, equations and calculus.

These two types of knowledge account for most of what we know about things that there are out there in the world. These two types of knowledge combine the best of human capacities: our ability to perceive, to sense the world, and our ability to calculate, to think about the world. They form the foundation for language, the foundation for logic, and the foundation for all of the sciences we have had up to today.

Empiricism and rationalism: these are the two great schools of philosophy that have shaped the world in modern times. Empiricism, the philosophy that all knowledge is derived from the senses. Rationalism, the philosophy that all knowledge is derived from calculation and realism. the two great schools of thought in our time.

In the 20th century, things changed. On the one hand, the great philosophers of the Vienna circle and their allies in Great Britain founded a philosophy that joined empiricism and rationalism. This philosophy, known as logical positivism, held that we begin with observations, and then use logic and reason to derive statements about the nature of the world. Any statement not derived in this way, they argued, was literally nonsense. It made no sense.

On the other hand, there was an undercurrent of scepticism about that grand enterprise. The American pragmaticsts - William James, Charles Sanders Pierce and John Dewey, argued that there was a third, practical domain of knowledge. The test that something is known, they said, is that it works. In Europe, meanwhile, philosophers found it difficult to accept that all of religion, art and literature were reduced to nonsense.

There are different types of meaning, said some. Meaning is derived from the text, say people like Heidegger and Derrida. meaning is use, say people like Wittgenstein. And there are different types of knowing. The logical positivists describe only our knowledge about things. But, argues Michael Polanyi, there is also 'knowing how'.

It seems clear, at the beginning of the 21st century, that there is a third type of knowledge, a type of knowledge that exists above and beyond the knowledge derived from the senses, and that exists above and beyond the calculations of logic and mathematics.

But though the existence of this knowledge seems to be beyond dispute, the characterization of this knowledge has been elusive. What is 'practical'? What is 'use'? What is 'literature'? What is 'knowing how'? What is 'ineffable knowledge'?

What is this knowledge? We are subjected to all kinds of theories, some that seem reasonable, some that are patent nonsense. Biorhythms. Astrology. Harmonic convergence. The 100th Monkey phenomenon. The music of the spheres. Intuition.

More to the point, such descriptions were importantly empty. It's one thing to say we should do whatever is practical, but quite another to figure out what the most practical thing is. Or when you say something is 'practical', for example, that it 'works', your description depends on what it was you wanted to do all along. If I don't want to do what you want to do, then what you know isn't what I know.

Connectivism is a theory that described this third type of knowledge. It is a theory that tells us what this third type of knowledge is, where it is, what produces it, how we learn it, and how it can be used.

Summary: Three types of knowledge
- of the senses (empirical)
- of quantity (rationalist)
- of connections (connective)

2.

As we have said earler, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections. Let me expand on that a bit.

Think about what we know about a simple object, say, a lump of coal.

When we look at it, we can see that it is black in colour, and a bit shiny. It is a rough shape. It isn't that heavy. It is hard to the touch, but we can break it. That's the qualitative knowledge we have of the coal.

When we begin to measure it we can say more. We can say that it has a mass of 500 grams, say. We can say that it has a certain density. Our lump of coal is composed of some billions of individual carbon atoms. Under certain conditions, it combines with oxygen, producing a certain amount of heat and releasing a certain amount of smoke. It is values at 23 cents on the international market. That's the quantitative knowledge we have about coal.

Yet there is a third type of knowledge we have about coal. We can know how many carbon atoms we have. But what makes coal, coal, is not just the fact that it is made up of carbon, but also of the way these carbon atoms are connected together. Take exactly the same atoms and connect them differently and you have graphite. Take the very same atoms and connect them differently again and you have diamonds.

This is a very simple example. Carbon atoms are very simple entities. The connections are simple, and they don't vary very much. They are stable, not changing a whole lot with time. So we can find out about how the atoms are connected indirectly: coal has a particular colour, diamonds have a particular hardness, graphite has a particular weight. Still, knowing about the connections is to know more than to know about the qualities and quantity of the material involved.

So, connective knowledge is knowledge OF the connections that exist in the world. It is knowledge about how such connections are created, and what impact, or effect, such a system of connections has. It is knowledge about how we see such connections, how we observe them, and how we observe their results. It is a theory, in addition, about how we measure such connections, how we count them, what sort of measurable properties they have. This is important: connectivism is a new type of knowledge, but it is not independent of other types of knowledge. We need to be able to see connections, and we need to be able to count them, in order to talk about them.

But I also want to introduce a second aspect of connective knowledge: the idea of connections as a WAY of knowing. This is a bit trickier, but is essential to our understanding of what we know and how we know it.

A network is a set of connections between a collection of things. A diamond, for example, is basically a network: it is a collection of carbon atoms that are very tightly connected to each other. But these connections don't appear out of nowhere; they are not created by magic. If we ask, how did these carbon atoms come to be connected *this* way, we learn something about the history of those carbon atoms, that they were subjected to intense heat and pressure. So information about what happened in the past has been stored in these carbon atoms, in the way they are connected.

With *any* set of connected objects, we can ask how the connections came to be that way. Which means that *any* set of connected objects can contain information. What happened to the individual entities in the network, what sort of *input* did they have, to become connected in this way?

A network, therefore, is like a sense organ. A network is stimulated, it takes a certain shape. Stimulate a network of carbon atoms with intense heat and pressure, and the carbon atoms reorganize; they take the form of a diamond. This is what can happen in any network of connected objects. When you impact that network in some way, the connections between the objects in the network change. And this results in the storage of information.

So we have two types of connective knowledge, the knowledge that we have OF networks, that we obtain by looking at networks, and knowledge that is created and stored BY networks in the world.

Summary: Connective knowledge is both:
- knowledge OF networks in the world
- knowledge obtained BY networks

3.

There are many types of networks, and therefore, many types of connective knowledge. We will look at these in much more detail through this course. For now, though, it is important to identify some different ways of talking about networks.

As we discussed in the introduction to connectivism, there are several types of networks that involve humans. One network, for example, is the human brain. The brain is composed of a collection of neurons that are connected to each other. Another network is society itself. Society is composed of humans that are connected to each other.

Now when we are talking about connectivism it is pretty easy to slip back and forth between these networks without noticing. It's easy to get confused. So it is important to keep in mind one's perspective or point of view when talking about networks.

Let's take, as our starting point, a single person.

This person is a part of a network. He or she is what we would call a 'node' in that network. As a node, he or she is connected to other people; it is this set of connections that make up what we can call a 'social network'.

At the same time, the person in question *has* a network. Or we might even say that the person *is* a network. This person is composed, at least in part, of a neural network, a brain, a complex organ for perceiving the world and storing those perceptions in the form of connections in a network of interconnected neurons.

These make up what may be thought of the person's 'active' participation in the network: the actual interactions that take place, the actual interactions that happen between this person and other people, the actual perceptions that reshape the person's neural network.

There is also a set of what may be called 'passive' or 'reflective' participations in the network.

Consider society. Society is a network of collected individuals. A person can participate in society as a node within the network. But it is also possible, through a variety of mechanisms, to observe society as a whole. To, if you will, detach oneself from society and to study it as though it were an collection of objects out there in the world. The same way you might study a lump of coal.

Similarly, we can (with more or less precision) reflect on our own neural network with some degree of detachment. We can observe, and feel, our sensation and passions, our thoughts, our ideas. We can study our own mind, through introspection. This process of reflection is a way of learning about ourselves.

When we are talking about connectivism and connective knowledge, we are talking about all four of these activities. And it is very easy to get caught up and mistake one for the other, to get confused by them. We need to get into the practice right from the very beginning of being clear about what sort of thing we are doing.

Now connectivism is sometimes characterizes a theory that emphasizes 'knowing who' over 'knowing what' and 'knowing how'. This may be, but only from a particular perspective. Only from a particular point of view. When you are looking to become a part of the network, to be and act as a node in the network, then you are most interested in 'knowing who'. You are interested in creating connections and using connections.

But it would be a mistake to characterize connectivism as a theory that is *only* about 'knowing who'. Understanding how networks work will help support our participation in them, but it will also help use create better networks - *knowing* networks - in ourselves and in our society, and it will help us better understand what we see when we *look* at networks.

Summary:

Active participation in the network:
- as a node in the network, by participating in society
- as a whole network, by perceiving with the brain (the neiural network)
Reflective participation in the network:
- by observing society as a whole
- by reflecting on our mental states and processes

It's Friday evening, I've just sent out OLWeekly, and I can reflect on the first week of the course.

I know that George can probably claim to have had the busier week, since he was on the road in England all week. But I think I had my own share of business as well, with a couple of on-line presentations sandwiched between a trip to Fredericton and some other writing.

Much of my week was taken up getting The Daily up and running. I decided, at the last minute, to adapt gRSShopper for the task. The software, which I use to run my personal website and newsletter, wasn't really designed for a course, so I had to make some changes.

First, I needed to create a screen to allow people to submit their feeds. This is usually an admin task. The only thing readers do on my site is submit comments. So I added a screen - but had to turn off the spam-filtering mechanism in order to accept the feeds. Within a day, I was knee-deep in spam. I spent a lot of time this week deleting spam messages - not here, but on my home website.

I also had to set up the system to allow me to mass-import a whole bunch of names and to subscribe them to the newsletter. This actually went pretty well. I also had top adjust the archive system to allow different pages to be viewed, something I would have had to do anyways. And I had to create the templates for the various pages and displays. It wasn't a huge pile of work - probably only a couple of days - but it came at a bad time.

This weekend, I'll be atten ding to the feed harvesting. For some reason, my feed authorization system isn't working on the connect.downes.ca site (this allows administrators to 'approve' feeds before harvesting starts - otherwise I'd be harvesting spam every day). And I want to finish the submission form, so people will edit (right now, they back up and try again, which results in multiple submissions). Then a small bit of work to get the posts into the newsletter - this bitr is already tested, so I know it works.

So that's the mechanics of it - what about the course?

Well, I'll say right off that I think i allowed myself to be pulled into the Moodle discussion too much. It's seductive - the system defaults to sending you these emails, and you start reading them with the best of intentions, and then, someone was wrong on the internet and, of course, must be corrected immediately. This happens once or twice on the first day, a dozen times on day five. Ack!

The course elements have kept me busy. There are three major things to do - the Monday presentation (I did a video, George did a doc), the Wednesday Elluminate (two sessions because of time zone issues) and the Friday UStream. That's four hours right there. And I haven't had to set any of that up - George did the wiki, moodle and website, along with the Elluminate site, and Dave Cormier and Jeff Lebow set up the Skype-UStream set-up. This really is a group effort, even if it doesn't appear that wai - Alec Couros is helping, Helene Fournier has set up a survey, and I'd really like to get someone to manage the documentation (Leigh....?) Not to men tion the people who set up Google Groups, Second Life sites, translations, and all the rest.

It was funny to read some criticism part way through the week about this being a course - if we were really practicing what we preached, we wouldn't be offering a course! Funny, first of all, because I've been practicing what I preach for many years - more than seven years of OLDaily, for example. And funny because the course elements of this are the hardest bits to pull off, the bit6s that feel the least natural, the bits that create the most needless complexity.

Having everybody descend on the thing at once, for example. Not that the 2152 people currently signed up aren't welcome. But it has felt, at times, like people wanted to cover the entire subject in the first five days. It's a lot easier if we can have people join more gradually, if we can ease our way into a discussion of various subjects. This instant pressure will lessen as the course progresses.

The nature of the subject has also contributed. If it were a course in logic and critical thinking (which I'm thinking of doing in the same style some time in the future) there would not have been the same rush. Most people in this course didn't even know what connectivism was when they started, and those that did know weren't sure they believed it. A less controversial subject would have a different type of discussion.

Also, connectivism is a really difficult topic to introduce. Normally, when you introduce a topic, you can do so with realatively common and widely understood concepts. Even something difficult like calculus, for example, is introduced using the vocabulary and tenets of mathematics. We aren't so luck in education. The foundational tenets of our discipline are almost uniformly in dispute. The ontology of the study - the nature and purpose of the things being studied - is in dispute. We say in our discussion this week that we could not even agree on what a theory is.

Next week will help, if we can get away from the arguments debunking connectivism long enough to study the underlying precepts of connectionist knowledge. I have found myself running around in circles this week, trying to respond to criticisms while at the same time trying to explain these underlying concepts.

I need to be careful - again - not to be drawn into this. Because, while I am happy to describe the theory, I really don't want to be drawn into arguments about the defense of it. Because these are disputes that will not be resolved by argument. If you think connectivism is fundamentally wrong, then noting I say is going to change your mind. I don't mind criticism - that is what advances thought. But I will attempt to draw a line for myself when it comes to trying to convince the critics.

What I've seen thus far is that the criticisms have come from two directions. This reflects the strength of the theory, but also underlines its fundamental challenge. On the one hand, we are accused by some of collectivism and even some form of communism. And yet, on the other hand, we are accused by others of rampant individualism. (There are other dichotomies like this in the discussion; this is just the most vivid).

I believe that this is because the theory is neither collectivist nor individualist. It doesn't argue that people (students, whatever) should subsume themselves under some sort of general will. At the same time, it doesn't suppose that people live their lives as lone wolves, responsible for and to only themselves. There is a middle ground between these two extremes, a half-way point between joining and not joining, which (we believe) may be found in the network. Oh, b ut to get to this point, which doesn't come up until week 5!

Well - George is on a train in England right now, and I'm relaxing at home on a Friday night. Time to rest for a bit - I have some programming to do this weekend, then another video to record. I want to move slowly, certainly, through the basic ideas, not arguing for them so much as letting the iudea make their own case for themselves. We'll see. This is a fun and extrordinarily fascinating process, yet not without its challenges.

Here is my response to Catherine Fitzpatrick's lengthy critique of What Connectivism Is. Her comments are in italics.

Here's my problem with your ideology, Stephen, which appears to me to be even more radical than constructivism and tries not only to describe or defend a new epistemology, but appears to disrupt social systems as well, in the name of some putative technocommunism that will reign supreme on the Internet with everybody working for nothing and getting everything for free and living happily ever after.

The theory explicitly attempts to define a new epistemology, that I've described in detail elsewhere.

As for the labels - well, the problem with lables is that they are vague. There are some elements of the theory that you may associate with communism, or radicality. But to infer based on that similarity that the theory is a type of communism, or a type of radicalism, is to substitute nomenclature for argument. It's a shallow form of criticism.

If that seems extreme or a caricature, I can only say that I can read out into the logic of your statements to see how you are destroying the idea of the university established through the ages.

I don't see how it forms the heart of either communism or radicalism to "destroy the idea of the university". But, again, as I've stated elsewhere, I believe that these traditional structures ought to be reformed. I have no difficulty admitting this, and do not consider it to be an objection to my position.

1. The theory might explain *some* types of learning *about some subjects* in *some situations* -- like opensource groups hacking around together on software. But that doesn't mean you can globalize it and make it apply to every single human endeavour. You can't.

This is unclear - is it the job of the theory to explain or is it something that we have to make apply to human endeavours?

Connectivism is, in the first instance, an epistemology and a description of human cognition (that is why we attach 'connective knowledge' to the title of the course). While I think we both would agree that there is an almost infinite variety to human reasoning, it is arguable (and I so argue) that the basic mechanisms are common to all humans.

It would be hard to assert otherwise. Cognition - in every human who has ever lived - takes place in the brain, and the brain is composed of an interconnected set of neurons. Neuroscience has explored the nature of the neurons and their connections, and describe the functioning of the brain in a manner consistent with our theory. That's the global part. But bothy George and I would also argue that, within that framework, there is also a great deal of diversity. This diversity also forms an important part of the theory.

A similar pattern applies to our theory understood as a theory of education and learning (the 'Connectivism' part of the course title). We argue that learning occurs in networks, and therefore, that the properties of successful networks are also the properties of successful learning environments. We don't 'apply' this in any strict sense - we would never force people to be connectivists. Indeed, within the learning environment, we believe there should be diversity; we believe people should be free to choose their own form of learning.

It's kind of like you are saying we are trying to make freedom apply in the educational process. But freedom isn't something one person makes, or applies, to another. It is something each person grasps for him or her self, given the opportunity and the circumstances. We seek only to provide the oppostunity and the circumstances.

a. I still have to pay a college some tuition if I want a degree -- you might think credentialing is all I buy, but I buy knowledge, too, which is not somehow withheld in some grasping and greedy capitalist manner, but simply requires *paying human beings who know, because teaching is work*. Don't you, as a professor, wish to get paid? Maybe tuitions are inflated; maybe more has to be made free -- these are social policies decided in a democratic society, not by technocrats welding theories into "disruptive technologies".

I has responded to the 'existing institutional structure' argument elsewhere.

But I would point out that neither George nor I expect professors (or whatever form instructors take in the future) to go unpaid. We are not arguing for free labour, insofar as labour is required.

But neither do we think that the professor or instructor figure ought to be doing everything that is currently done, and we are not in favour of an educational model that matches one expert to a small, select number of students. We believe that learning should be open, which means changing the nature of professorial work.

If George and I can successfully teach 1900 students, then we should be paid. But we should probably not be paid at the same per-student rate of current professors. Not that either of us couldn't use the million dollars.

b. Certain teaching has to occur with certain life situations that aren't endlessly accessible from people who aren't endlessly available on a 24/7 Internet that is itself a reduced form of connection, whatever its marvels. Let's take nursing a baby, for example, which few realize until they've learned it that it is learned behaviour for both mother and child. There's no substitute for having your mother, or more likely, a very well trained and capable lactation nurse, sit with you and the baby and impart the techniques by demonstration and interaction. It is not merely a job of connection, or "proper connection", latching on. It has to do with experience, storage of concepts and "lore," memorizing technique, many elements that only a literalist and reductivist would parse into endless "connectivity".

I am not an expert in the pedagogy of nursing practices, nor would I claim to be so. But it seems to me that the majority of mothers learned to nurse their children outside a formal educational institution.

And this just is part of the sore idea of connectivism. We certainly agree that some types of learning involve close personal connections between individuals. We encourage that. What we disagree with is the idea that only formal learning environments and qualified professionals can offer such connections. Learning, as often as not, takes place on a person to person basis, on a student to student basis. The person with some experience - the mother - shows the person with no experience - the daughter.

As to the theory of learning that is advanced here - "experience, storage of concepts and "lore," memorizing technique, many elements that only a literalist and reductivist would parse into endless "connectivity" - we respectfully disagree (at least I do; George will make his own statement).

From my perspective, statements like "storage of concepts" are in important ways fundamentally misleading. It is not a case of me being a literalist or a reductivist - a better description would be to call me an 'eliminativist'. I simply think that the phrase "storage of concepts" has any correspondence with what actually happens.

2. Not content to merely describe how *some* learning *might* be going on in the Internet context (which mainly applies *to technology itself* but not to the content that can fill those new means of communication), you now manufacture a pedagogy out of this. It now has to become a learning doctrine inflicted on our kids in the schools, although they've already been dumbed down and impaired by the constructivist ideologues for the last decade or more -- and by other variously rewarmed and recycled Ilich or whatever they read in the 1970s to make everything meaningless, relative, and dependent only on child-centric operations that lead nowhere, as they can't fill with content or demand any standard.

It is not clear to me that it is constructivism that has dumbed down (to use your phrase) education. Countries such as Canada and Finland score very well on international tests (imperfect measurements though they are) and yet widely use constructivist techniques.

Indeed, it seems to me, from where I sit, that as education in the U.S. turns more and more 'back to basics', with rote and drill test preparation, the resulting education is more and more (to use your phrase) "dumbed down." The place where education is failing the most seems to be the place most resistant to constructivist and modern 'progressive' educational methodology.

That said, this is not a defense of constructivism, which has its own able adherents.

I would certainly resist the suggestion that connectivism in any respect resembles a "dumbing down" of education. Indeed, one of the more frequent criticisms we hear is that students are not capable of learning this way, that it sets the standards too high, that they need far more instruction, guidance and direction than we propose.

Indeed, read the rest of your criticism, and you see this type of argument frequently repeated. How can you say we are offering a dumbing down when we are passing so much responsibility on to the learner?

As for people like Illich and Friere - we openly admit our debt to these thinkers. That does not mean we are mere Illich and Friere clones. But when they suggest that bthere is a connection between traditional forms of education and oppression, we agree (at least, I do; George again can make his position known).

3. There's a lot that seems not to be captured by this doctrine. I'm with Tony when he says "Connectivism should still address the hard struggle within of deep thinking, of creating understanding. This is more than the process of making connections."

Again, it's not clear what is being required here.

The difficulty and depth of connectivist learning should be obvious to anyone who looks at this course; again, the complexity is one of the most oft-cited concerns.

Probably the suggestion is that there is not an instance of 'deep thinking' in any particular instance of content. That we have not, for example, subjected students to a long and extended argument, built on sustained chain of reasoning.

Well - I may well teach a course one day where Principia Mathmatica is part of the curriculum. But that said, I simply do not think that that sort of structure constitutes 'deep thinking'.

When you analyse the structure of such treatises, the reasoning is very clear and evident, formed of relatively simple types of inference - propositional and predicate calculus, modal and deontic logic, probability, mathematics (if it's advanced), boolean logic, and maybe (if it is advanced) inductive reasoning, metaphor and analogy.

These forms of inference, being in the main linguistically and syntactically based, can be assembled into a relatively long and complex chain without a lot of difficulty (at least, by someone who has mastered the basic forms).

Rather more difficulty occurs when the reader seeks to look beyond what is said, to analyse the terminology employed against a background set of beliefs, to expose the inconsistencies and ill-formed inferences, to find the empty and vapid concepts, to distill the clutter of rhetorical device, to identify the assumptions, the presuppositions, the linguistic traces of theory and unstated inference, to expose what is manifestly the emptiness of much traditionally 'deep' literature.

To me, far more complex - and insightful - forms of reasoning are being created through the interplay among thousands, or millions, of individual content elements. Where each content element may by itself appear to be simple, it is the interconnections between them that creates a much more complex, deep, and rich tapestry of meaning, far more than could be created merely using linguistic devices.

That's why Polanyi describes much of our knowledge as tacit - as subsymbolic. It is too complex, too detailed, to be rendered as mere text.

To complain that the form of reasoning we would encourage students to take part in as shallow is a gross misrepresentation.

It is substantially harder to work with the disorder and complexity we see within a connectivist network. Because linguistic (syntactical and semantical) descriptions of the concepts and entities in such a network just barely touch the surface, and students must therefore immerse themselves in the process of reasoning in such a system, rather than merely reading about it.

The process of "enlightenment," if you will, for lack of a better term ("recognition" isn't adequate), isn't just connecting dots; it's a process of intelligence -- human intelligence making sense of the myriad connections, and you cannot reduce intelligence to connections -- comprehension, awareness, memory -- these faculties are all about something higher than mere connections that does indeed depend on three things that constructivists seem to destroy or deny:

Goodness, I would never say that 'recognition' is merely a process of connecting dots.

Recognition is a physical process in which an already existing and relevantly similar patten of connectivity in a neural network is activated through an interplay the corresponding sensory stimuli. To be able to do this is to have first grown the relevant pattern connectivity, a long and involved process.

That said, this - "you cannot reduce intelligence to connections -- comprehension, awareness, memory -- these faculties are all about something higher than mere connections" - remains a proposition yet to be proven. And - again - I am not proposing to reduce such folk-psychological terms as comprehension, awareness or memory. I am rather challenging their capacity to explain anything at all, and questioning whether a theory formed of such concepts can ever work at all.

a. Created cultural and knowledge context -- institutions. Hey, they aren't evil. They work. They are not "all broken" as the "personal democracy" networkers imagine.

Institutions, as they say, tend to 'work well' for the people they favour.

We have just finished a century wracked with world war and atomic destruction, and we live in a world that is dying environmentally, perpetuates poverty and misery for a large number of its citizens, and continues to tolerate armed conflict as a means of resolving international differences.

Even in relatively stable societies governed almost entirely by institutions, poverty runs rampant, millions get by without health care, crime is rife, the economy is teetering and the country is on the verge of being plunged into a credit crisis while the government borrows its way into oblivion in order to fund an illegal and immoral war.

Your definition of 'working' is very different from mine.

b. Authority -- established by actual practice, experience, being proven right etc. Again, not inherently evil, but necessary in a democratic society to prevent the endless tyranny of a zillion subjectivities claiming decentralized or nodic "authority" just by showing up.

Most authority in our world is obtained through the barrel of a gun or purchased with unearned (and often stolen) wealth.

The phrase "tyranny of a zillion subjectivities" is literally nonsensical.

The sentiment expressed in this paragraph is classically Hobbes - his justification for the right of the monarch is that without such a central authority the lives of the mass of men would be "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short."

The justification of order and authority in contemporary society are more subtle, based on the (oft ill-used) 'consent of the governed'. Such 'social contract' theories, ranging from Locke to Rawls, are based on some sort of fiction that, were we given the choice, we would opt for the government we have. After all - to quote Locke - if we don't like it, we could always leave.

I certainly don't think that anything like a majority would have opted for what we actually have as a society. The governance of society has essentially been handed over to an elite, and, as Rousseau says, an elite, when it governs, governs solely in its own interest.

'Authority' - properly so-called - is typically the representation of the will of this elite. And it is only the illogic of such an elite that can depict the freeing of a population from this will as some sort of imposition or tyranny.

c. Tradition -- while opensourceniks imagine they have utterly escaped anything that seems oppressive and old-fashioned or "Luddite," in fact they create even more rigid doctrines and rituals. Tradition does help create a knowledge context and means of conveyance that does work.

Actually, we call such 'traditions' things like 'standards' and 'protocols' - and the major difference between our interpretation of tradition and that of the previously existing regime i