Brains working towards machine consciousness

I am intrigued. Starting a blog post with that seems to be becoming a bit of a habit, but it is true (I guess I feel motivated to post most when intrigued perplexed or baffled).

Several people in the CCK08 massively online course on Connectivism and Connected knowledge have been discussing online identity, self and reputation. One of the interesting points is about how engaged you can feel when dealing with an avatar (graphical or textual) which has obviously been designed as an ephemeral presence purely for a particular purpose. If there is no back history available, can you feel a sense of trust?

Mike Bogle (@mbogle on Twitter) has a great post on the change needed to support education in the future, which he drew my attention to after I Twittered "knowledge and learning are incarcerated in a monopolistic mould/mold which inhibits innovation and accentuates elitism. Discuss". I might argue it is change that was needed in the past, but I am guessing we can't achieve that now. I recommend Mike's post over this one. Mine is truly a rant, but sometimes a rant is needed...

I have received an invitation to take part in a collaborative critical review of Connectivism by Roy Williams who I met through the Connectivism and Connected Learning course run by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. The project is seeking to critically assess Connectivism and examine whether there is a benefit in providing a Web 2 Learning Theory.

Over at her blog, Frances Bell has a useful critique of Connectivism underway (I believe this is also being combined into a wiki somewhere...)

I posted a comment over there:

This Is Me is an Eduserv funded project to design learning materials to help with education about forming, maintaining and securing your personal identity on the web, otherwise known as their Digital Identity (DI). The initial stages involve collecting people's stories about DI, whether cautionary, advisory, entertaining or just plain educational.

The internet provides many resources and many distractions. Of the resources, some are higher quality than others. A learner, seeking understanding, is in a similar position to a ship's captain - aiming to reach a certain goal, but without necessarily having accurate charts to plot the route, weather forecasts to predict disturbances to their route, and possibly without much idea of how the rudder works, or from where they are starting.

I have to apologise to those who have commented on this blog - until now I had thought that the server was emailing me when I got comments (it used to), but that appears not to be the case at the moment. I will try and address this, so your comments get published with the minimum of delay.

Oh, and if you would like to leave your name in the post, that would be grand :-)

I have held off posting about this, as I wanted to make sure I wasn't being too 'hot headed', but the more I see, the more I am sure there is something wrong.