The Magic Box

I'm finding the Connectivism thing to be a total hustle so far -- more vaparous Web 2.0 hoo-hah, dressed up as "science". I'm still waiting to make up my mind as to whether it is a big pretentious bore or more dangerous and destructive (it's complicated enough so that it may not catch on widely, and that's a boon for us all : ) )

I simply believe that you don't have 1,900 of anything that becomes something coherent other than the Pied Piper of Hamlin leading people to their doom, or some other demagogue with the fanatically blind in his trail. The idea that people are "learning in a course" is a vast fiction. Er, please don't teach heart surgery or even international affairs with these, uh, "methods" -- mkay?

Start with the Moodle Muddle -- it's just an old bulletin board with stuff on it, a forums, people's icons, the ability to have "multimedia" blah blah but glorified by being "free" and "opensource" and having like zillions of people joining it and translating it into other languages (sure, if you have enough Marxist professors of digital arts flogging it, each one can force 100 or 1000 of their students every year to sign into it at least once just to get graded, most likely, so they have a captive audience.

There was one of the most hilarious "mind maps" or "technology maps" or whatever the hell it was that I found to be one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen. And thinking about that ridiculous Rube-Goldberg machine for "e-learning," I suddenly saw a flash, and I'll try to explain it.

My God, it's all pipes. Just pipes. Er, tubes, if you like. Really. And these plumbers are trying to pass off the pipes as important as the content inside, and pass off the joints -- the Connectivity -- as the magic feature -- hence Connectivism that is better than the content, too. What a load of crap!

This system appears to be more radical than Constructivism, which basically says that little Johnny or Janey constructs their own world, as child-centric little darlings, never referencing any sort of culture, tradition, religion, morals, or even great works of literature -- God forbid, as such things would be oppressive, white, hegemonic, or evil and imperialist. They "learn" as they "construct a reality". But...This is still too stilted and institutional (!) for some real extremists, hence the idea that everything is just a lot of neurons connecting and firing randomly, and it's all good. Nobody in charge. No experts. No students. Everyone just learning in a sort of connected plasma of feel-good. Can't resist it, because that's *just how things are* so *adapt or die*. Pretty awful stuff!

But to understand all this better, let's remember the world before the Internet.

Let's say you have a town in the 1970s, a university town, and there is a professor, and he decides to put on a sort of newfangled course where he will use innovative methods and harness all kinds of creative oral histories or ephemera or current events or whatever he picks up to make his subject -- let's say it's "World War II" become more "relevant". He's a 1960s type, so becoming "more relevant" is where it's at. And let's say there's Janey, who signs up for the course to "study World War II" from a reading list, a set of books in the library, perhaps original texts, perhaps some textbooks or analysis, perhaps some oral histories -- but she is encouraged to go out and find new materials for new sorts of work. Talk to her grandfather on the phone, see what he recalls. Write to her uncle or the school's patron who has made a hobby of the subject -- whatever, using all the tools of her day.

So let's imagine how he and she pipes out some plumbing, if you will, to capture all kinds of drips. Nothing is irrelevant. Everything counts. Let's add into the mix Jane's grandfather, who actually served in World War II -- but perhaps the garrulous old coot in fact spent a good deal of the war guarding the pool at the officer's club at Fort Benning, and only arrived, oh, after D-Day, when all the shooting was over, in order to perform some administrative function doing inventory. And let's say there are other people whom one can "learn from". These might be -- a newspaper vendor who lived through World War II and to whom Janey talks to every day on her way to school, but he never fought, he was too old. Or let's say there's a Nazi war criminal, who she discovers through hearing about a club with a pamphlet that she gets out of an ad in the mail. Let's say there's a donor to the school library who wasn't in World War II or was too young really to remember it but thinks it was a good war and wants to glorify, oh, Canada's part in it. Let's see -- then we might have Jane's boyfriend, who is a goofy peacenik and thinks war is unhealthy for children and other living things. We could add in Jane's mother, who is concerned that she get married, and not study history. Let's put in Jane's brother, who has to go fight in, oh, Vietnam or something.

So let's picture Jane making a big map of all these connections. Let's put in her pen-pals from summer camp from France. Let's add a friend of her grandmother's who lives in Turkey. Let's pick someone from the senior class who sits next to her at the library. Any number of people with any number of connections. Janey starts interviewing people, gathering scraps, picking up books, getting pamphlets in the mail from strange Nazi groups, listening to endless and irrelevant yammering from the dotty newspaper vendor -- and perhaps she might dip into the official course textbook, and may even wake up early enough from partying all weekend with her boyfriend to show up to an 8:30 am lecture on the subject from the professor, who has spent his entire adult life studying archives about World War II in various countries, interviewing displaced persons and soldiers, and even has a book out and several articles.

Now, let's picture that along comes, oh, Prof. McCluhan. And he has this very special Magic Box that can take all this information and all these connections that Janey has gathered from her teacher or just from her journeys through life, whether she has a pamphlet from some newspaper ad or her grandfather's partial memories. And what this marvelous Professor does is put it all up, so that it can not only scroll before you in full, with complete transcripts, but it can also be searched and accessed at will. Of course, the act of searching tends to increase the liklihood that certain things will come up first -- let's say it's a feature of the Magic Box. But that's ok, throw it all in the pot, see what sticks.

And there Janey sits, with the Nazi war criminal's pamphlet scrolling first just because it's longest or other people with the same access to McCluhan's Magic Box are tantalized by the idea of an actual Nazi and pick the topic. Let's say next comes Janey's grandfather's memories of boxing up thousands of pairs of unused work gloves and latrine shovels from a depot in France. Let's say the friend in Turkey scrolls through -- because she writes little, but repetitively, wanting to stick her oar in about something. The wealthy donor eager to play up Canada's role starts some jaunt to assemble Lend-Lease Program artifacts to put on an exhibition. The professor's reading list may never be accessed; and who says it is relevant? He may know more than anything, but the Magic Box is the Magic Box -- it shows what is interesting -- that's it's magic. Janey stares at the Magic Box all day. It is very cunning. It has found incredible ways to ferret out not only her grandfather's telephone conversation transcripts, but his old letters and his conversations with his chess buddies who might remember a bit more and it has exhaustive stories about Lend-Lease and daring pilots in the Arctic.

All of it is random, but all of it is relevant because it is Janey who is in power at this particular learning node, and she in fact, in her process of "noding it up" is constructing a kind of nonce-world -- the world of *her* contacts and connections and interests that work for her. The professor's list may lie untapped at the bottom of all this dross, but its purpose was merely to serve as a springboard of associations, because Janey won't *pay attention* unless she is indulged to make *her world* and *her myspace of connections and her facebook of contacts*.

Now imagine if Prof. McCluhan had a friend, Prof. George, who became fascinated with the workings of the Magic Box, into which people were stuffing everything including the kitchen sink, and let's say he began to investigate and describe this evolving tool and begin to design a course in Boxism. He studies all the pipes and the connections and becomes fascinated with the way the tool was able to instantly deliver the grandfather's telephone conversations and chats with his buddies and even fold in the letters from the grandmother's friend in Turkey and provide actual original signed and stamped documents from the inventory in the depot. Meanwhile, the sheer luridness and massiveness of the Nazi war criminal's spewings -- he even kept photographs of his victims -- continues to clog the pipes, but bigger ones can be built. The professor's list is well, something that must be described in the boxes in Boxism but it isn't a bigger or better box -- just a box! As all boxes are! You can't play favourites with boxes now in Boxism, can you?! And say, let Prof. George turn up another colleague who says, by George, we really should track the ethnology of these boxes! Why, there's the woman from Turkey, and the pen-pal in France, and rich, rich prospects to mine here!

Let's say Prof. McCluhan, so as not to constrict the Magic Box in its ever-fascinating evolving growth, doesn't "judge". He develops a pragmatic philosophy that with transparency will automatically come accountability. Sure, the Nazi has air time -- and sure the trivialities of the depot's inventory receipts are a problem, but eventually, it will all sort itself out, because with a million eyes on the problem, no problem can remain hidden. Janey may be left with a pile of useless scraps if there were no Magic Box; the pipes wouldn't pipe anything and she couldn't possibly pass the test from the professor on World War II because she never got through even one chapter of the book. But that's ok, because who's counting? Why judge? The facts are there, from that professor who spent his youth in the archives in Europe, acquiring a hunched and nearsighted aspect. Perhaps he is unable to replicate anyone like himself; no one wants to study, they only wish to connect and connect -- for entertainment's sake, mainly, as life is so "boring" -- especially outside the Magic Box.

But he will pass Janey in the course because she piped. She connected. The Magic Box really did its magic. She got out of it what was relevant to her, and that was what blessed the subject with "relevancy". She may never hear about the Archduke Ferdinand or the German humiliation at Versailles or wonder if her grand-dad could have suffered from "shell-shock" or what happened at Dresden or Stalingrad. But these subjects, all equally relevant in the pipes, can be "looked up". They are "there" and here at the end of history, we have only to go back and sift through the pile (ultimately Connectivism is more guilty of a belief in some sort of End of History emerging out of some Hegelian evolution than anything Fukuyama came up with, because you never have to worry how to investigate or study or find facts; they are all there to be connected to, without prejudice.)

I guess I've meandered through this rather contrived analogy to try to shake loose the situation we find ourselves in now. Where 1,900 people who show up to "learn" about something are all blessed equally with relevance. Where the two people running this learning show spend 50 percent of their time apologizing for being "centers" or "authorities" in any way, since with the Tao of this Plumbing, they need the flow to just go through the pipes and not eddy around any one sandbar -- they are mere "administrative hints" to keep the doctrinal process intact. The main thing is to incite cheerleading about the pipes, the pipes themselves.

Then they spend the other 50 percent doubling back on that, telling you that you've used a term wrong, or haven't understood something that "everybody knows" from the IRC channel, or moderating your speech to make sure you are "respectful" because...whatever. That's how we do things here.

Really, the Internet is a big phone. It's hooked up to a lot of trucks. People order stuff and some people get paid to pack and ship it. They also send news and discuss it, oh, and some pictures. Not an *awful* lot happens on this giant phone line, which merely added text and pictures in the last 100 years, so in fact it hasn't done anything really revolutionary or mind-shattering. The Internet is merely an extension of the phone, and the phone merely extended the mails. We're not really evolving SO terribly fastly or well because well, nobody has learned how to read anybody else's mind yet just because they can read their fast IMs.

By going 2.0, the big phone with the trucks merely became a kind of party line, so with all those Twitters and APIs and Facebooks where you can send somebody a fish for their aquarium or you can beam your geographical coordinates to people on their cell phones -- well it's just a more noisy party line. Sometimes it's interesting to pick it up and listen in -- sometimes it isn't. Having the fire hose of it can get dull despite the great promise of perhaps picking over all the clues and finding the inventory receipt from the depot in France or the Turkish woman's take on events that might bring all the kaleidoscope pieces into focus. Mostly what people talk about on the big party line attached to trucks, however is...about how the party line doesn't work, about about 50 new people with some gadgets and gizmos that are going to make it possible to make more friends or push more lines of text or pictures in more ways simultaneously to make the party line more of a party. Everybody thinks that because so many people showed up for the party, and there are just so many damn pipes, it will be fun. They wait in vain.

Then comes web 3.D as it used to be called (not anymore, heh!) Now, is this quantitatively different? Well, it's merely a party line...with no trucks hooked up to it. It could well be a step back. The pictures are now like TV, it could be more entertaining, and more useful for prototyping. But...it's a party line at the end of the day and it's not clear if it is revolutionizing human consciousness.

Not to worry, you can just keep studying the boxes and the pipes between them and it may keep you busy for a very long time.

Meanwhile, the fellow studying Boxism has a rich and complex matrix to engage himself in for decades to come, assuring himself and his college various six-figured grants and fellowships. There's the way in which one person interacts on the pipes. There's the way in which unaware people find out the pipes of still other people. There is the contrasting of information in pipes. There is tagging and searching everything that might someday be important -- you never know, the depot receipt could come in handy to solve some historical clue. That quaint old professor who had his knowledge stuffed inside books, which was in its day distilled from reading miles of original crumbling documents -- well, that's ok, but...is it relevant? I mean, there is the Turkish perspective. And there's *understanding* the Nazi, who might have had an unhappy childhood. There's the pipes, the pipes...

Comments

[Monk Zymurgy]

Wow...well that went right over my head. You seem to have gone a little crazy, something is eating you up from the inside. Right now, I just want to give a massive squeezy hug and say 'dont worry, it will all be alright'.

[Michael Coghlan]

Catherine - I've been reading your comments on the forums in the mega connectivism course. While I disagree with most of what you say I do find it kind of refreshing to read someone so vehemently opposed to the value of connectivism and questioning the views of the 'echo chamber.' Do you blog anywhere else? I'd like to track you....for balance!

[Eyal Sivan]

Damn you. I hate to admit it but you're right on many counts.

I see your point that we should not blindly accept "the pipes" as our new dogma, allowing for "endless subjectivity" at the risk of losing the truly relevant.

On the other hand, clearly something is happening. These new technologies do diffuse everything and quite literally call into question the idea of objective relevance.

The resultant "posses" as you call them (in another post), what McLuhan calls "tribes" may very well suffer from groupthink, but they do in fact happen, and they do in fact coalesce around specific interests and points-of-view. The abundance of choice offered by new technology makes these communities-of-interest ever more accessible, stealing time away from the objectively relevant.

So here is my question: What is your solution? Do you feel we should just turn off Facebook, Second Life, etc. to re-claim time for more important things, challenging "some Hegelian imperative"? Or do you feel both bottom-up online networks and top-down Universities and equally valid, and the issue is really about balance?

If so, How do you strike a balance between Pipeism & Boxism??

The questions are sincere, not rhetorical.

[Prokofy Neva]

I don't see how they do "call into question objective relevance". There have always been a million birds twittering on the wire. So what? You just didn't record -- or connect to -- their every expression. The inanity of Janey's grandfather talking about the depot receipts -- that would never enter into any equation, and it would only be in an utterly fractured world that you would say that was a clue just as important a clue as anybody else's research, and throw over the professor's hard WORK culling meaning out of archival documents, for example.

Look at the Facebook group. Lame, stupid, redundant. 287 people or whatever join it, put up a couple dumb pictures, and you know what the entire content of their conversation is? Trying to figure out what each other's names are on other services so as to follow each other. Facebook merely becomes a staging area to organize, say, Twitter.

But that's not going to last. More and more, these services will die off as they don't provide value, only those that can collect money or keep getting VC infusions or have strong ad networks will prevail, and in 10 years, we'll be using less of them -- or in 10 minutes, as there are just too many of them. People reach a saturation point.

People don't enjoy being scattered -- the serendipity of finding the odd pearl off a Twitter wears off very, very quickly and then people follow less, or stop using Twitter, or only use it with FriendFeed. You have to look at people's actual behaviour, which is why I point to the Facebook group. I can almost guarantee you this FB group will have nothing happening in it of interest ever, now or in the future, and will fold.

The objectively relevant persists, gleaming in the dark, even if the window fractures into a million pieces. There may be many paths to the objectively relevant, and understanding may be imperfect, but so what? Most people aren't Walt Whitman and don't feel the need to be large and contatin multitudes.

I think the use of these services, or their fabulousness, is overly exaggerated, and I don't think you need to "turn them off". People will gravitate to what they like, and you can't force them to go Plurk if they never liked the name or felt the comfort level. They are fads, they come and go, and eventualyl it will settle, but I'm not for artificially forcing it.

I do think that educators do not have to cave and buckle to these fads. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a centralized depot of knowledge, a course page, with the course outline, with concepts and book lists, and there isn't some imperative to have a wiki that everybody can pull back and forth among themselves.

If a professor has time for a blog, he can put up a blog, but you don't see a lot of such things because I suspect professors would rather get paid for publications and do their paid work of doing lecture plans rather than blogs.

I have no idea if there is some balance point between "top down" university and "bottom up" social media but that isn't how I'd phrase it.

First of all, the university as it is today isn't the top-down horror that these extremist professors are claiming. There's nothing wrong with having an expert and small groups. There is demonstrable learning that takes place and if it takes flunking students who are lazy and can't make the effort to engage -- so be it. We likely admit and pass too many people in college -- it's not for everyone, and that's ok. There are other kinds of learning and they can go on at people's own pace.

I also don't think these social media are the fabulous open bottom-up thingies you are implying. In fact, they are usually whipsawed by a few influencers on the blogging A-list and by a few strategic commandos with early morning e-mail instructions or Twitters. There's very little new said by anybody; there's a few who are merely replicated over and over.

I don't believe in either Pipism or Boxism -- I don't build theories around pipes. The content is what matters.

[Horus Vale]

I had to laugh at the "Mind Map". Its so convoluted that it reminds me of a labyrinth made by an ancient sect. Its a flow chart straight from the mind of the flying spaghetti monster. Maybe if I walk its full set of paths I can see god. :-)
"Let's look at the chart, shall we?" - Ross Perot

[Prokofy Neva]

Actually, there's something even MORE hilarious than this nutty flow chart, which I found from the twitters today:

http://flickr.com/photos/psd/1805709102/

This is the enemy, revealing his plan for takeover.

Read my twits on this today:

http://twitter.com/Prokofy/statuses/917888385

[Horus Vale]

Thank you Prokofy for sharing "The Web is Agreement" poster. It made my afternoon. I particularly like the darkside of the net shown as the land of "Mordorsoft" complete with the "Google's All Seeing Eye" ROTFL :-D Yes, there is alot of conflicts of interested parties on the net, but that is what makes it interesting. Sorta like the 'Chinese Curse' - "May you live in interesting times".

[Eyal Sivan]

Your arguments, while well constructed, are circular.

On the one hand, you say there definitely is such a thing as objective relevance. You vehemently and consistently critique any point-of-view that says all opinions are created equal, because they simply are not. Let's call you history professor, Prof. Frege. You say Professor Frege's "WORK culling meaning out of archival documents" is *clearly* more relevant and has earned him the right to be called an expert. As part of being an expert, he can rightfully tell others what are the objectively relevant elements of his field.

On the other hand, we should fear Prof. McLuhan or anyone else who challenges such expertise. They are the enemy, trying to lure the masses into a stupor by saying all subjective opinions are equally valid. They are nothing but charismatic charlatans, Pied Pipers, you claim, trying to increase their own influence and power.

But How do we know the Professor Frege isn't trying to increase his influence and power? Or less insidiously, how do we know he isn't just biased towards, say, stories about the Luftwaffe or concentration camps?

Further, how do we know Prof. McLuhan isn't an expert on, say, rhetoric and language (which he was)? What if McLuhan wasn't a philosopher, but another WWII history professor who just disagreed with Frege? What makes him a Bolshevist charlatan and Prof. Frege an expert? Worse, what is Frege's expertise goes unquestioned forever and we just take it for granted that the most relevant part of WWII was the Luftwaffe?

What is an expert? And how did that one expert determine what was objectively relevant?

This is a paradox. You're basically saying that Frege = good because expert = good, but McLuhan = bad because he says expert = bad, even though McLuhan = expert.

So who get's to decide what is objectively relevant?

You do. And so do I.
What is objectively relevant is ultimately subjective.

Please not that this does not mean all positions are equal! That would just be stupid, as it would create the dumbest network possible. What you seem to take issue with is the lack of mechanisms to allow objectively relevant positions to be raised to the fore, and here I could not agree more.

The Web is not Agreement. The Web is Argument.

[Prokofy Neva]

I don't see anything "circular". I think you just disagree.

There are indeed better or worse sources of information. The Nazi war criminal is a biased source of information obviously. Let's assume the professor who is the World War II expert, who I haven't named, is not a war criminal and not sympathetic to war criminals (I didn't say that he was) -- he merely researched the archives in good faith.

The principle of good faith is always desperately needed in these theories, because bad faith always undoes them, but no one ever examines it.

Janey really could learn more about World War II from Professor Expert -- more than she can learn from her own grandfather, the newspaper vendor, or the war criminal. But that's just it -- I'm not setting up Prof. Expert as the ONLY source; merely *an authoritative source*. New media and all this connecting power can be used to *enhance* pluralism; it need not destroy authority, however, which is what the pipists are say.

Pipists (the fictional McLuhan -- the real McLuhan might not have been so exclusively a pipist, it doesn't seem like him, but then, I only audited his undergraduate courses) put everything into the blender as equal -- or so it seems, because they externalize knowledge, deny internal judgements, and make the pipe process of accessing more important than the content.

George Siemens and other connectiviss say you have to teach students criteria to be able to judge the relevancy of knowledge. And..how will you abstract this out of your subjectivity or their subjectivity unless you make some sort of criteria for expert status? Expert status is fine. There are criteria that we need not deconstructivize away into nothingness:

o read a variety of sources
o read original documents from archives
o talked to various sides in the conflict
o passed written and oral exams in the subject
o wrote a sustained thesis paper

and so on. These may be jettisoned now as activities for assessing learning, but that seems silly, they're perfectly fine.

Your approach requires suspicion of each authority way past the coherence and rationality point. The university is an organism that goes through and hires professors who aren't Nazi war criminals, hopefully, and not Bolsheviks, either (but they are less rigorous on the latter).

I don't have a problem with a 45 year old professor who has studied books, written thesis, sustained his study over time, checked archives, etc. etc. being called more smart and more authoritative than me, a rank undergraduate with only, say, my grandfather's memories and the most cursory Wikipedia knowledge of the subject.

So, no, I don't get to decide what is authoritative, nor do you, if i don't want to be smashed on the rocks of a million subjectivities, but do want to learn about World War II. I don't have to follow the illusory path of deconstructivism now wrapped up as connectivism. I can just say "Prof. Expert clearly knows more based on these criteria and based on my trust in the university as an institution which has a 50 year history of not putting Nazi War criminals at the podiums" and go forward. I'm not willing to let trust and reputation (other goofy geeky categories that are overrated these days) be the sole criteria, but they are a factory implicitly contained in the "university of good reputation" concept. Furthermore, the rigour of work as an academic with a Ph.D. stands itself as an institution.

Common sense is also often missing from these theories.

I don't say McLuhan is "bad," I say that merely he is giddy with excitement about boxes and pipes and willing to relativize and even destroy, by design or accident along the way. His description of something begins to have prescriptive powers (as connectivism instantly did on day one of this course for many) and he becomes suspect as he is not cleaving to some basic common sense about what is an expert.

There aren't objective mechanisms to bring relevancy -- or expertise -- the fore -- unless you cast aside this silly deconstruvist and connectivist baggage and approach the problem with normal common sense. You say common sense is merely a cultural construct? That's ok, so be it. It's a good cultural construct that serves well to distinguish between ignorant Janey and expert professors and war criminals.

Is this a community function? Well, not necessarily, if the community is made up of freaks like boxists thinking the pipe is more important than the content. You can't rely on them to have common sense about such matters.

[thesis paper]

Wonderful article, thanks for putting this together! "This is obviously one great post. Thanks for the valuable information and insights you have so provided here. Keep it up!"