Unanswered Question

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Unanswered Question
Andy Roberts asks this, following the Connectivism conference last week: "My biggest unanswered question is about the politics of connectivism... If we embrace the theory and refer to it in our own practice then we are helping to spread an idea, a perspective, which has implications and consequences." I think it is clear in these pages that the understanding of how people know and learn carries with it political implications, as it argues for a set of principles - diversity, say, or decentralization - on the basis of improved learning and more reliable knowledge. It also, by postulating a distributed theory of knowledge, very clearly assigns to each individual an inherent worth or value. This in my view creates a political theory that some people would call radical (I wouldn't). That said, there is no need to 'spread' the theory. More...