Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
They told me my philosophy courses would never be useful, but this could have come straight from my metaphysics class: "People don’t exist in environments, they exist in themselves and their semilattice-esque relationships with other actors (communities, individuals, spaces, inanimate objects...)." Why is this important? When we are creating a learning system, we are creating a mechanism that allows people to interact with, to experience, and to learn from the world. But what is the nature of this system - is it an environment, as Lisa Kimball suggests, or is it the lattice of relationships described by James Farmer? I submit that it is a complex construction that enables, first, a wide variety of experiences akin to (and possibly extending upon) our experiences of the natural world: things to see, touch, do, and otherwise sense; and second, a mechanism for interpreting and comprehending this experience, a syntax, putting it into a structure, a semantics, which assigns it meaning, and a pragmatics, that gives it a context and use.

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

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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2024 08:00 a.m.

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