My 2. paper for the CCK08: Answering the questions of Maru: My practical position on connectivism, that means my position like teacher

I answer maybe too late your questions in my last post about my "atomic learning theory" Maru, sorry.
But here I am going to do it. A post only for you ; )

I don´t take care about the possibility to measure the "speed" of the student in learning (speed in sense of efficience use of the learning network in internet). For me it is only important that he/she does it. I think that each student is very different and "measures" need allways too many "stardards" or general points of reference, and that is not my first goal in teaching. I know that the evaluation and feedback is very important for the students, but I see it in so personal sense as possible. Of course I have to "note" my students, but that is for me not the most important. I do it, because I have to do it, that is all. The real feedback that I give them is not a note, it is a critic comment or a suggestion.
What each person of the group (and yes, for me the group is very important) learnt autonomously is different. And the "complexity" of all this "personal interactions" between the persons in the group, the group, the network, and the collective, are the "orbit" (the Connective Knowledge) of my interpretation of Connective Learning (I remeber now the so long discussion about "what is connectivism" in Moodle...). That means for me that there is not an "orbit" before the start of the process of learning. The students do the "orbit" for a concret topic, in my case spanish learning is the topic, but the possibles orbits are infinite (Chaos, yeah ; )
I think that we have not to encourage speed in the "normal sense" of the word, but we have to encourage some "efficiences uses" of a chaotic network.
Learning is a personal and individual process, I speak not here of "connectivist learning" really, I know, but we can use the network and the collective to generate learning and, of course, "connectivist Knowledge", but these "connectivist Knowledge" per se is also not the goal.
That is the reason why I find the idea of PLE (Personal Learning Environment) so interesting, and that is my way to improve the "connectivism" in my class.

Now how I do it at this moment:

I try that the students work voluntary with personal individual blogs and I link these blogs later in a "central blog". That is only the "group", that is the class, I know, but in a more open context in time and space: the internet, a virtual group paralel to the "formal presential group". The next steep in this process is the "group/network". All the students are going to surf in the PLE of the other students and in the central blog. The last steep is to open this "group/network" to the "internet/network".
The students look for interesting "nodes / contacs" in the web. They learn with these nodes and they integrate in this fashion the new external nodes in the "group".
In this last moment the group is open to the external network. The groups feelings/emotions are allways there, but the interaction with the external nodes let see that in a secondary position.
That is my practical approach to "my idea of connectivism". If I am wrong in the "theoretical-conceptual explication" or not is for me not so important. The thing is that this new form of learning works fine so in my class in this chaotic world of ephemeralization. ; )

Besos
Carlos

PD1. It was a very helpful for me lecture of a more practical approach the lecture of this week of Renata Phelps "Developing Online From Simplicity toward Complexity: Going with the Flow of Non-Linear Learning".

PD2. Sorry Maru, I wanted to answer you and at the end I wrote something like my 2. Paper for this CCK08: Changing roles of educators

PD3. I like very much the "snap shots" tool... Thank you, I learn it in your blog.