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…