Anto’stuff

To me, it’s hard to make sense of connectivism as a learning theory. So, since the course started, I often have been searching examples of connectivistic situations in my daily work.

Here another little story of daily life connectivism:

Background:

Since weeks, I’m struggling with the writing of a research paper.  The work is proceeding quite slow.. Unfortunately I’m not so well inspired..

The story:

Yesterday afternoon, I was NOT working at the chapter nor had desire to do it…

Instead, I was lazily browsing my Google Reader, with no specific objective.

Suddenly, I stumbled on a post by Thieme Hennis about Wordle, an online tool to make tag clouds from a text. Note: I (virtually)  knew Thieme last year, on the occasion of the OpenEd 2007 course, and simply kept the RSS feed from his blog in my reader. In brief, he’s a very little part of my network…

Wow! What a coincidence! I needed to make a tag cloud from a piece of text for my paper but I didnt’ know that such a tool existed, even though I am sure I tried to search it googling with no success (I found how to generate tag clouds from sites and RSS feeds but not from text files..)

So, I was able to re-start to work at my paper and had my nice tag cloud!!

Yes, I’m aware this is a little, very ordinary case of serendipity, but I argue it’s also a good example of connectivistic knowledge: the useful information (knowledge) emerged from my network, that was also supported by the technology of RSS and Google Reader. Furthermore, the serendipity had a positive effect on motivation, since it leaded me to resume my work..

All this only due to a simple, mostly silent, little connection…