(photo by RonAlmog of Flickr)

I am participating, in a non-credit capacity, in the massively online course Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. This is a great experiment to apply the ideas of connective knowledge to a course about the same topic. As a programmer, I enjoy the recursive nature of that. The course started this week. I am a little behind on my homework but I am catching up. My first task was to post an introduction on the Moodle forum for the course.

 Here is what I posted to the forums:

I am Dave Bauer from a small town outside Albany, New York. I am chief architect at Solution Grove, a company that provides online learning technology, among other things.

I have been interested in learning pretty much ever since I got online. I have followed a networked, hyperlinked path all around learning and learning technology, and hopefully this course will give me even more to think about, and help me organize me thinking.

This course will be a success for me if I can take what I have learned, and actually explain it to someone else!

I have actually followed a networked learning path to my current job. I was exploring online for ways to improve a retail web site I ran about 10 years ago. I discovered an online book,  Philip and Alex's Guide to Online Publishing, and after reading that, I changed my focus. The main premise (besides the software behind it) is that a community is a set of people focused on learning. So from there I learned about online community software and eventually taught myself enough to find a full time job building interesting online communties, often focused on some form of learning.

I hope to be able to learn from this course how to make better software tools for online learning by understanding how the learning half of that actually works.