Simon Grant of CETIS

Stephen Downes’s whiteboard (in op cit) shows what purports to be an evolution from groups to networks. This strikes me as far too much about global evolution (as in “we’re onto the next big thing”). It is really, in my opinion, about personal growth and development. People grow from needing the security of what are characterised as “groups” to being able to function in the relatively unprotected area of what are called “networks”. But one should not be dogmatic about this kind of thing. There will always be people (of all ages) who function better within the confines of the “group”. “Networks” aren’t better, they are just a different way of doing things.

Thus in educational technology, we shouldn’t be following this kind of thing as the way we ought to be developing new tools (whether it is called “e-learning 2.0″ or whatever) but we should be developing technology to support people where they are and ideally to help prepare them for moving on to ever greater personal (ethical) development, freedom, integrity - you name your favourite positive value.

Reading Stephen Downes’s article, Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge, October 16, 2006

Insight: people’s views about things are often really reflections of their values, rather than statements of beliefs about fact. People believe things because of the connotations; because of the other people that believe them; because of the values that they perceive to be associated with them.

But (and here is the big “but” ) discussion and argument rapidly become fruitless and futile on this model. You can’t argue against values through “mere” facts.

Solution: surface the values. Help people to make their values explicit, so that they don’t have to use beliefs about things as proxies. That way, if we have congruent values, we can work together even though we may differ in our beliefs.

Well, lo and behold! While folks are discussing folksonomies on the METADATA list, the official conference wiki page has this

cetis-2006-conference

If you want to tag an item for a particular session, use one of these:

cetis-2006-conference-media
cetis-2006-conference-games
cetis-2006-conference-portfolios
cetis-2006-conference-accreditation
cetis-2006-conference-ple
cetis-2006-conference-architecture
cetis-2006-conference-institutions
cetis-2006-conference-unthinkable

Very nice example, if I may say so, of, not quite a controlled vocabulary, but the best kind of sort-of “guidance” vocabulary. This is the kind of thing we need if folksonomic tags are going to work better than the critics of Clay Shirky fear.

Sue Manuel mentioned Clay Shirky’s article in a post to CETIS-METADATA today. I don’t think I had read it before.

Seems to me Shirky has missed a vital distinction. I go along with him, up to a point, in terms of classification, but there is no distinction in his article between classification on the one hand and signification of meaning on the other.

This could be developed greatly, but for the moment let me point out that one of the advantages of tagging something not just in text format, but with a reference to a common identifier, is to make the intentions of the tagger clear, and to lessen the likelihood of making mistakes - particularly spelling mistakes, and where one term has various meanings.

Later addition: try this critic of Shirky - thank goodness I don’ t have to write it out here as someone else has (as usual).