The ultimate connections CCK08

For some years I have taken part in and followes the evolving discourse about knowledge building in community contexts, about connectedness and collective intelligence. This month, a huge massive experiment is unfolding around two key persons in this field, George Siemens and Stephen Downes. They are developing and sharing a highly actual and open ended course on Connectivism in education, with a paid and certified version hosted by the University of Manitoba, supplied and partially followed by some thousand registered participants. Honestly, I had the best intentions to be an active part of this, but after some weeks of just taking a look occasionally, I admit that I am just lurking. There was some very aggressive conversation so typical for old hat righteousness power game, something about who was dominating the Moodle threads, and this made me feel like I would rather stay silent, and so I did.

The course structure is exemplary for our current web 2.0 with multiple layers of tagging, blogging, the Moodle and the Wiki, plus two weekly synchronous sessions, slides on Slideshare, photos on Flickr, Facebook group and Twitter hash tags, you name it. State of the art. And, oh yews, also some presence on Second Life. Too bad that I have currently only ONE life...

Kudos to the two busy key persons, Stephen and George. They are making it obvious that this flat world of web 2.0 interested folks now counts thousands of edducation minded people all over the world.