Rethinking Web 3.0 and Connectivism

Today Florence Meichel @fmeichel sent me a link to her post Qu'est-ce que la cognition - points de repères en sciences cognitives - which is translated from the French as: What Cognition? Benchmarks in the Cognitive Sciences. This resulted from a short exhange we had earlier today on Twitter about the nature of thinking and learning within a Web 3.0 or 'semantic based' web. My earlier post on e-Learning 3.0 also came up in the conversation and Florence argued that George Siemen's Connectivist approach to learning in a digital age might actually be superceded by our need to reconceptualise the whole idea of what learning will mean - especially when we are immersed in a world of ambient mobile pervasive communication where intelligent agents and filtering tools do our bidding for us. 'Connectionism is so Web 2.0' - was her argument in essence. To underline her point Florence shows that connectivism represents thinking differently to other theories of cognition, and that a new theory of cognition will be required to explain how we represent knowledge in a semantic web.

Well, here for English speakers is her post. Hopefully I have translated it into English without losing too much of the nuance or power of Florence's ideas:

I share here with you some useful benchmarks to help include/understand different cognitive approaches.

For a cognitivist, cognition is the handling of symbols which start from primitive rules. This is the principle upon which computers still function (but this is changing!). One example: a computer handles the colours red and white to form a pink square - the symbol and rule of the square are previously imposed.

For a connectionist, cognition is the emergence of total states in a network of simple components. Here simple components remain primitive. An example: On a table you can place different coloured mosaic squares and people will together create a collective work which was not previously agreed upon. This experiment is that of the poetic generator which I previously spoke about.

For an “enactivist”, cognition is the action of production - that which through the process of the interaction to cause the emergence of permanent co-constructions. One example: The colour red is a collective agreement which has emerged progressively over time through multiple interactions around perceptions. This representation is not imposed but rather, constructed. We can thus deconstruct and rebuild concepts in a creative way through human interaction.

In my opinion, what we learn in acts within social networks are dimensions of the connectionist and enactivist theories described here.

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