Obstantia frustra est

The learner is like a Star Fleet captain. She has powerful tools at her disposal to aid her learning: a super computer with instant access to all collected knowledge in her quadrant of the galaxy, and a faster than light speed ship to take her wherever she needs to be to learn new things by direct discovery. She's a team player. Her crew is a community of talented, learned, creative individuals who are ready and able to contribute to the mission. Many of them are also good friends who provide the captain with social and emotional support. She's also part of an even larger network, the United Federation of Planets. She can be in touch with peoples from all different cultures, each with its own learning and perspective. They can inspire her and bring fresh insight to her own explorations.

But sometimes there are great challenges. A captain might find a species so strange and different from her own that the universal translator can no longer function. Her ship might fly through a spatial anomaly causing the engine to fail and subspace communication to go offline. Her crew might suddenly become infected with an alien virus. She might become stranded on an alien planet, separated from all her technological tools as well as her crew. Sometimes, she must make profound moral choices, and there is no one who can make them for her. A Star Fleet captain's work requires years of training, deep personal knowledge, the ability to reflect, flexibility, creativity, openness to others' ideas, communication skills, and self reliance. But she is prepared for any new encounter she must face.

Now many of you probably aren't sci-fi nerds, and you might not have seen much Star Trek. You may need a concrete example to better understand my metaphor. Let us consider my personal hero, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Federation Starship Enterprise.



The character is a true Renaissance man. Of course he can pilot a starship, conduct diplomatic negotiations between two warring planets, lead scientific research missions, and bring out the best in all of those serving under his command. That's just standard Star Trek captain stuff.
But Picard can also direct a Shakespeare play. He can read ancient Greek, speak English, French, Latin and Klingon. He sometimes publishes articles on xenoarchaeology. He can be your Cha'DIch in a Klingon trial. He sings Gilbert and Sullivan tunes. He can make wine. He can fence and ride horses. And his moral compass never fails.

He exemplifies what the Germans call selbst bildung, self-education. He is a lifelong learner, constantly developing his own well-rounded personal store of knowledge. And good thing too. When he's out exploring the final frontier and a crisis hits, more often than not he's on his own.

There was a time he was plugged into a vast learning network. Connections between nodes were never down. Aggregated information flowed freely. But that didn't go so well.


Picard was assimilated by the Borg, a collective of cybernetic organisms who travel through the galaxy assimilating peoples and their whole cultural knowledge. This destroys all individuality in the process of course, and the Borg don't mind killing a lot of people to get the job done.
Picard became Locutus of Borg. He no longer could choose what to share, how to apply his knowledge. Everything he knew, everything he experienced, everything he was became part of the collective and was used to kill hundreds of Federation citizens.

Since I've already given away so much of the episode I don't feel bad telling you that in the end his fellow officers find a way to disconnect him from the Borg and remove his cybernetic implants. It took him a long time to heal emotionally from the experience but he does recover. He goes on to be a brilliant Star Fleet captain through four more seasons and four feature films.

*****

Our class read an article by George Siemens, Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age.I do agree with some of his theses. Yes, the "ability to see connections between fields, ideas and concepts is a core skill." Sometimes people keep specializing and specializing and stop seeing the connections. It's the connections that illuminate knowledge. The connections make information relevant and meaningful.
I also agree with what he says in his video The Impact of Social Learning Software on Learning: “It really boils down to our ability to have a dialogue with other individuals. And when we have that dialogue, we ourselves grow in our knowledge, and we grow in our own understanding and our own ideas sometimes." I know I've experienced that in my own learning. Communication forces us to articulate what we mean. Dialectic with those who have more knowledge, or with those who disagree with us can teach us so much more than we can learn on our own. There are tremendous benefits to being an active member of a community of learners. As teachers, we have to teach our students effective communication skills, provide a place where dialogue can take place, and direct our students toward other forums where this knowledge is happening.

And yet,
there is so much that I disagree with. One quote in the article really bothered me:
"The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe."

On a literal level, I fundamentally disagree. I care very much whether the water coming out of my pipes is safe and pure. No fancy faucet fixture is going to make me OK with drinking toxic contaminants.

And on a metaphorical level, I can't help but think of the Borg. Their organizational effectiveness is flawless. Their efficiency unparalleled. Their "pipes" are perfect.
Captain Picard was sometimes less connected to new developments than I am today. I'm updated by Facebook, and podcasts, and news sites about all sorts of events, and can comment on them on Facebook or my blog immediately, while Picard has a lot of debriefing to do when he returns from remote corners of the galaxy. But it was OK to be disconnected. He could focus on one job at a time and use his full concentration. He wasn't constantly distracted when he had to save the ship or make an ethical decision.
As Locutus he was completely connected. The millions of voices of the collective were always with him. The group knew so much more than he could ever know as an individual. But what came down the "pipes" of this process was significant. The collected knowledge, the constant updating, the efficiency and the connectivism of the Borg were used to perpetuate violence.

I think we can learn from the connectivist theory of learning. But I'd rather have a learner who may not always be up to date, but is unique, an autodidact, and can think and act for herself regardless of her situation.