Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
Why do education theorists, when they reach a certain point, always strive to create a taxonomy? At a certain level, because it's easy - you don't have to do any actual research, you just reinterpret common vocabulary and couch it within the parameters of your own theory. And, at a certain level, it's reassuring - you are telling practitioners that their existing knowledge is, after all, correct. Just look at the way people in the comments are suggesting connectivism build on this or that taxonomy, as though it weren't a critique of these positions after all. But at its heart, the creation of a taxonomy is just an arbitrary categorization of phenomena, often without a theoretical basis or grounding. And a 'connectivist taxonomy', in particular, is at odds with a network-based theory of meaning.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Mar 28, 2024 04:22 a.m.

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