unexpected ed adventures

Twitter as an Indian Train
I’m not so sure that Connectivism requires technology and perhaps it can work in other contexts.  That we have a certain amount of interrelatedness (being part of a network) may be enough on its own.  It may be that we can learn through any  f2f or online interconnectedness.  A lot of interesting learning for example I suspect occurs on a train travelling through India.  And while I have been to India, I didn’t travel on a train and these ideas of mine are thus a bit third hand.

Indian trains rarely travel on time and are usually very late. They are crowded and confusing affairs for a westerner.  But for Indians they are a huge source of learning through connectedness.  When a train stops in an Indian village, everyone comes to meet the train.  They talk and gossip with those on the train and in the process learn what is happening with friends and relatives (and probably everyone else) who is on the train or along that particular train line.  The train is the source of news but also the carrier of news.  A particular type of learning (or better described as piecing together the jigsaw of multiple conversations to understand new information).  A contextualising occurs so that new intelligences are formed from many disparate pieces of information.  I am reminded of ideas of the mind as a hologram, that within every cell of the brain, the whole mind resides (which we might extrapolate to within every individual, the knowledge of the network resides).  For those on the Indian train, one doesn’t have to hear every piece of information to know everything that goes on.  There is a process akin to inference or the mathematical principle of induction, or  where a greater whole of knowledge can be deduced from the sum of the parts.  Thus a great deal of learning occurs.

I think Twitter has created a process like an Indian Train.  There are many conversations that occur, often trivial, but which help us learn a greater whole – at least that’s how I use it.  There are those I learn directly from; but can also read into their tweets what is being learnt from (and by) those that they follow.  And thus without having to follow every link or thread I feel my learning is much greater.  Twitter can also work as a filter in that I follow people who, if something new is important enough, they will usually mention it.  I don’t feel I have to follow all the great learning gurus, though I follow some. If one of the important ones I don’t follow says or does something of importance, I’m usually going to find out through the network.

Twitter as information control
Information also (potentially) moves much faster on Twitter than via any other medium and it is interesting to see political commentators and emergency departments using it to disseminate news faster than traditional media.  I also notice that some mainstream and financial media are using Twitter.  Historically those who have control of the quickest form of information transfer, can potentially gain access to the most wealth and power.  Twitter as a business model, might be worth a lot more than we think.

Twitter and esp
I wonder if before all this if information transferal didn’t require such modern means as trains and Twitter.  And perhaps there was not even need for learning by association as Downes suggests,  for learning to occur.  In Australia it is well known that when an Aboriginal person dies, everyone else in the tribe will know, regardless of their location or physical proximity to that person.  As another example, Aboriginal elder Wanjuk Marika in his biography (Life Story, published by University of Queensland Press) describes how later in life he developed the ability to go into an unfamiliar landscape and from it learn and “know” the myths and stories of the place and its people, even if the former tribe of the area no longer existed.  And a third example – Laurens van der Post in Lost World of the Kalahari describes how all the people of the Kalahari tribe, again despite their location, immediately know when a hunting party has tracked and killed one of the much sought after Elan antelopes, their favourite food (and something of a symbolic totem).  I suspect we have lost such abilities of psychic knowing through technology – it’s easier to use a phone than remain in the semi conscious altered state that facilitates such knowing.  But perhaps we can get a glimpse of immediate learning and network knowledge through the speed of new applications like Twitter.

As an afterthought about psychic learning or ESP, I remember as a psychology student having access to the opportunity to one of the few university psychology departments in the world ( think at the time there were only 65 of them worldwide – definitely not a research priority!) which included formal study of Parapsychology as part of the curriculum.  (This was at the University of Tasmania under a brilliant teacher Dr Jurgen Keil ).  Huge research was done (I think during the 1930s) meta-analysing already established large collections of ESP events.  From memory (and I’d be happy to be corrected), one of the conclusions was that ESP events more readily occurred when an incident occurs that potentially (or actually) endangers someone to whom we are related (more commonly received by women curiously enough).  A further conclusion can then be made that learning via ESP more readily occurs because it has survival value for the tribe – if we can learn that someone close to us is endangered, we might be able to act to help save them.  However if a technology can bypass this need (or make it easier) then there is no need for ESP.  Thus over the millenia this ability has faded into the background of consciousness.

So perhaps technologies like SMS and Twitter can awaken us to this dormant form of learning?  Perhaps networked learning and intelligence exists a-priory after all and it’s my hope that the stratospheric rise in relatedness enabled by technology might mediate it’s revival to our modern consciousness.