I joined the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course, described as a “rather large open online course” with hundreds of participants worldwide. I had the intention of actively participating, but soon became overwhelmed, downgrading myself to lurking and snatching a few tidbits from their daily newsletter. This reminded me of a post on Zen Habits on one of the new rules of working:

“Communication is a stream. In the traditional model, paperwork comes into an inbox, and you process things sequentially until you’re done…So when email became the norm, the same top-down, sequential processing applied”…until it became overwhelming and impossible to keep up.

“So the new way of working sees communication as a stream. You go in and bathe in the stream, and then get out. It’s never-ending — think about when emails and IMs and Twitters and RSS feeds and forum posts and other types of things you read ever stopped coming in….”

Sounds somewhat like the “stacatto thinking” described in last week’s post. No doubt new media survival requires new modes of working, but transitioning is painful and certainly not seamless. Wading in seems to work fine for popular media, news, and boring meetings, but it is more challenging in a course. As an instructor, it is one of my pet peeves that students ask questions about information that is clearly posted, but that doesn’t happen to be in their immediate stream.

Perhaps having a high quality google-like search tool in our course management systems would make it easier for both students and instructors to wade in. But in the meantime, I am having a hard time keeping my head above water.

Tags: communication, learning, organization, social networking, web 2.0

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Ann writes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.