This is a comment I made on a post on @Bali_Maha ‘s blog. Maha’s post is a call to question so I question. So, hers is the inspiration for my response.
One of the biggest problems I have with connected learning as a particular theory (and with theories in general) is that they, like words themselves, have a hidden agenda. The poet Ted Hughes puts it this way, “Words tend to shut out the simplest things we wish to say. In a way, words are continually trying to displace our experience. And in so far as they are stronger than the raw life of our experience, and full of themselves and all the dictionaries they have digested, they do displace it.” Theories do likewise.
I have not given up on words, but let’s just say I question their motives. I think you are right about what you say about connection above, but I am also worried that our words about connection are like planetariums. They are analogous to the night sky, but they are not the night sky. That’s why I love stories, tales of action, goings on and doings described. Your stories about the conditions of connection and learning in Egypt during January 2011 mean more to me than the phrase ‘multidimensional connection’ does.
Multidimensional Egyptian Meme Connection:
I think I get what you mean by the phrase, but it seems to me in the end to displace your experience of that multidimensionality. That’s eight syllables of blurred and approximate, displaced meaning. I suppose this is why I love poetry–experience approached at a slant. Simon’s poetic post makes multidimensional connections, but I think that if someone summed up one of my zeegas only in such an abstract way, well…them’s fightin’ words.
I know that this comment is a rant against the paucity of words as a measure of experience. I just want us to be aware always that this connected learning is not mostly about digital connecting in digital space, it is about words themselves as a measure of what we really know. It is a cautionary tale. I fear as I write this that I am not getting across how much I appreciate what you have written or that I really find what you say is…convivial.
I want to call on Ted Hughes again because his words fail less spectacularly than mine. Here is a shared link to a scanned page of his from the relatively unknown collection of his essays, “Poetry in the Making”:
