Narratives of coherence
George Siemens on Aug 6th 2008
Grand narratives – such as provide us with a large umbrella that we can use to make sense of the world – have been besieged over the last several decades. Grand narratives in the form of newspapers, newscasts, and books are now augmented by blogs and YouTube videos. As discussed in a previous post, one of our key challenges in this course is to find a way to bring together the numerous ideas and viewpoints in a way that makes sense for participants.
Self-selection is one model (i.e. follow certain threads in Moodle and blogs). Centralization is another – bring the conversation to one central spot – as we’re doing with Moodle. Aggregation – in this case, with PageFlakes – is a third. Each of these approaches is an attempt to provide or create some type of a narrative – namely, a narrative of coherence. But coherence in this context is created by each learner. In a traditional course, the educator hacks the trails to complex information landscapes. The educator’s bias influences what is included and excluded. What we’re talking about here is the ability for each learner to create their own narrative of coherence.
While it is obvious that information shaping approaches such as we find in newspapers and books are fading in prominence, we still need some type of framework to make sense of it all. For example, while I don’t read newspapers (except when traveling and they magically appear on my doorstep each morning), even people who are avid newspaper readers find other ways to augment their interpretation. The comments on the online newspaper site, for example. Or blogs. Or a Google Alert. Or a Technorati search.
In a recent bizzare murder in Manitoba, I found information through traditional news channels online. But of greater interest were the extensive comments, Facebook group, etc. All of us are actively engaged in trying to bring together multiple voices in some type of coherent structure. Sometimes the coherence we seek is around a particular event. Other times it is more broad, such as when we are trying to make sense of what’s happening in society. Or politics.
We repeatedly hear how intelligence failures result in catastrophe. The information that was needed to find out what was happening – with terrorist attacts, for example – is later found to have been present. People viewing the information were simply not able to put the pieces together into some kind of a coherent whole. In a sense, the information wasn’t being connected in a meaningful manner.
I’m personally quite interested to see how the concept of a narrative of coherence will unfold in this course. We all face information abundance. We all face the reality that we will always be missing some key pieces of information. In our previous online conferences, we had large numbers enrolled, but I would say less that 5% were active contributors. A common concern voiced by many of the active participants: how do we assimilate/makesense of this information?!? There’s just too much of it.
Part of the solution is to rely on one’s learning network to filter out nonsense and to draw attention to key ideas. This is particularly effective when we can “plug in” to a network with high levels of diversity and with people we quickly begin to trust. Technological patterning is another – and in the long run, very promising – approach. ManyEyes, tag clouds, social interaction, word frequency and occurence analysis, and other ways of surfacing connections and interaction trails offer great opportunity. But these approaches are not yet commonly available. Or intuitive. For example, ManyEyes is great for visualizing word occurence. But, it’s not intuitive. I have to cut and paste text into the site. I’d like more of my sensemaking tools to function automatically. That is, I don’t want to explicitly add text to a site. I want the site to continually evaluate what’s happening and to provide information to the user. A learning management system often provides very useful analytics to faculty. Why not turn that around and make interaction information available to learners?
If you have ideas on how to increase the ability for individuals to form personal, coherent narratives, let us know…
Filed in Uncategorized | 10 responses so far
Helena Ramos Aug 6th 2008 at 01:41 pm 1
You said: Key challenges in this course: Find a way to bring together the numerous ideas and viewpoints in a way that makes sense for participants maybe by a narrative of coherence: coherence in this context is created by each learner. How do we assimilate/makesense of this information?!? There’s just too much of it.
You said : Part of the solution is to rely on one’s learning network to filter out nonsense and to draw attention to key ideas
But —
From my experience: One can always find the information. If I fail to catch it directly ( via my tools) but it is vital for my surviving in a context, someone will forward to me by , for sure.
But to form personal, coherent narratives, is necessary to have the feeling of belonging. Belonging is to understand what the others within the community are saying and are practicing, but it is also to feel that what I am saying is understood and have the sense that the community cherries my participation as valuable information .
The challenge in this course, taking into account the MOOC type, is to produce a minimum of feedback, behaviorism objective, to connect each person. Can we do it? I am sure that if we succeed in this action, a lot more than of the predicted 5% active contributors, will stay connected.
What we have to fear is the linguistic barrier, as a consequence of cultural or dash and dot frontiers, in personal communication, not in making the contents available and accessible . Can we cope with that?
Mind the GAP
Helena Ramos
eRoman Aug 6th 2008 at 11:33 pm 2
@Helena, I think you have raised a fascinating point that has made me think about a couple of studies [Markus and Kitayama 1991, 1994; Kitayama & Markus 1990; and others as mentioned in Walker, Deng & Dieser 2005-http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3702/is_200501/ai_n9520744/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1).
] dealing with the concept of self-construal, and the differences that exist among cultures and individuals who are predominantly independent or interdependent. According to those studies, one of these differences is precisely the sense of belonging that you mention. Interdependent self-construals feel more strongly about it than independent self-construals (you can see a more detailed explanation on this and other differences, along with a short literature review in Walker, Deng & Dieser 2005.)
Based on that, it would be very interesting to me to find out what role those differences play in a networked society like ours and in a multicultural course like this. From my experience, I don’t think the network has eased those differences yet–not sure whether I would like for that to happen. To mention an example, four years ago, I conducted a survey among English and Spanish speaking Wikipedians, and the results regarding their motivation to participate in the Wikipedia project were worthy of note: “For Spanish Wikipedia contributors, the sense of building and being part of a large community pays off for the less-rewarding moments of their life as Wikipedians. This is obvious not only by analyzing the answers submitted by the survey respondents but also by taking a look at the large amount of hits that personal pages have in the Spanish version of Wikipedia. English Wikipedia contributors, on the other side, also acknowledge the joys of being part of a community, but, for the most part, they seem more interested in the administrative aspects of Wikipedia, such as creating rules and guidelines, enforcing them and providing for a smooth work with the administrators.” Other differences based on the type of self-construal are very common on our daily interactions on the network.
In the specific context of our course, I wonder how many participants share that urge for belonging and how many of those who don’t share that need consider it to be an aspect worth considering while discussing connectivism and connective knowledge. As Walker, Deng & Dieser (2005) state it is very easy “to be unaware of the Kulturbrille (i.e., “cultural glasses”; Ichheiser, 1970) we all [...] sometimes wear. Fortunately, this course is so large and diverse that I have no doubt that we all will help each other to become aware of the glasses we are all wearing.
Regards,
Esperanza
eRoman Aug 7th 2008 at 06:25 pm 3
Hi George,
I have just read at elearnspace.org that you were trying to access Verhagen’s article “Connectivism: a new learning theory?”
There is copy on the SURF archives. Go to http://surf.nettrack.capsis.nl/publisher/index.php, click on SURF Foundation, choose elearning.surf.nl, and in the search box (zoek naar) type “Verhagen”. The search results include a copy in English of that very article.
Greetings,
Esperanza
//Sorry to post this here but I wasn’t able to find a way to post it on elearnspace.
Maria Teresa Aug 7th 2008 at 08:34 pm 4
Coherence, from Latin cohaerere = to be connected, and narrative is the description of a sequence of events. So, a narrative of coherence would be the description of the sequence of events that are connected (the make sense of a network).
I think that if a piece of important information is missing and the sequence cannot be linked, participants will automatically look for it, as Helena said, and connect the dots in order to make sense out of it. “Nature hates a vacum. So, I don’t foresee a problem of this nature in this course.
A different thing is to have access to a huge amount of information and to have to select those that, when placed in certain sequence and linked, finally makes a sense (a narrative). Can the network do that for us ? No, I don’t think so. The network can filter the information based on parameters of linkable events, but cannot put it in a sequence in order to make sense. That is why I would insist in a centralized approach also (“bring the conversation to one central spot – as we’re doing with Moodle”).
The “belonging feeling” referred by Helena and Esperanza is, in my opinion, what underlies in the governance of the network, but “la raison d’etre” of the network is the “course”. The former in a MOOC, will probably be a headache. The second, is the anchor.
Maria Teresa
Shelley Aug 8th 2008 at 05:56 am 5
I think a designated “meta” area might help, so that folks who are drawn to thinking about course workings would know where to go with their suggestions/desires.
And I know from participating on a relatively large Ning that some group-wide commitment to folksonomy/ tagging can be helpful.
Self-assignment into streams or interest groups?
How many people are we talking about, here?
Looking forward…
Dolors Capdet Aug 8th 2008 at 10:02 am 6
Shelley spoke of the community Ning. Personally I participate in several groups in this community.
In one have almost 800 members. The work logically is distributed by interest groups.
Moreover, a few years ago I had the opportunity to participate in the design and tutoring of the virtual course on Open Source for 435 business managers.
We work a teaching guide, an instructional design adjusted to the context, a constructivist methodology and then distribute the students function at the level of knowledge initial accredited.
We use a system of tutorials and was the guardian who was responsible for carrying out the activity and summary information about content. That was an idea that already outlined in the grou.ps of the CCK08.
The results were good but it would be happy if they find new alternatives for new methodological assumptions.
Petteri Laine Aug 29th 2008 at 07:45 am 7
Could we build student user profiles where we can write a list of personal tags, and then build a bot to count procentual coherence of interest to each topic?
Steve Lowe Sep 8th 2008 at 03:21 pm 8
I think like all narratives it needs a route map and some flags if participants are to become oriented and stay connected. A practical suggestion I’d like to moot is that the CCK08 First Impressions map posted at http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~x28/en/172/cckenv.jpg and visible from this morning’s Daily should be a clickable image map like a tourist map of the city. I appreciate somebody has to spend about half a day doing that, and that somebodies may be thin on the ground…
New terms scrapbook « Web Mush Newbie Blogger Sep 9th 2008 at 03:04 pm 9
[...] narratives of coherence: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=61 [...]
Shirley Williams Sep 11th 2008 at 05:50 am 10
My big problem is knowing how to filter what to read, I’m fine at aggregating content together but what I find difficult is deciding what not to read. I find my network actually adds to my growing “to read” pile, I’ve read really good stuff because I have seen one or more of my Twitter contacts mentioning an item.
I fear more technology will just highlight even more great material.