Stephen Downes

Jacques Derrida did not directly influence the formation of my own theories of knowledge - I was educated in a different traditon - but I find significant overlap. This, for example: "What is written is finite. That is, the moment that there is inscription, there is necessarily a selection, and there is, therefore, erasure, omission, a leaving-out, exclusion." How many times, I ask myself, have I said that language is an abstraction, a caricature of what we actually mean? So anyhow, it is because of this overlap that I really welcome this module developed by Stella Bastone comparing Derrida's deconstructionism with our own connectivism. There's a lot of really good content here, so if you find yourself with a few hours of free time and are up for some heady thinking, this module is just the ticket.