With this third article on “Cultivating Connection” I try to come back to the starting question: “How to stay on line?”

In patient reader’s expectations, but maybe also in mine, there is probably the speech technical conclusion: which instruments we should use and how we have to use them.

I confess that I tried to rewrite various articles and that I threw them away, one after the other. The more I tried to approach technical aspects, the more I moved away.

I abdicate, then, and I assume that my incapacity represents a precise signal: the problem isn’t technical. There isn’t a technical problem. It appears to be, why technology quantity around us creates anxiety and takes off lucidity. A real mental block that, together with school education that passed education off as knowledge, prevents most of people from realizing that today you don’t have to learn anything to be able to use internet.

We only have to realize it and it is only a mental matter. The problem is that education doesn’t help to release your mind. I’ll do a banal example. When I am at a meeting and we are talking about computer solutions for education or for university organization I often suggest the use of costless and pervasively available instruments like blogs, wiki, shared documents or other similar instruments.

Usually somebody objects: “But we should acquire skills and we don’t have the time, you can’t ask us to follow a proper course!”. Certainly not, perish the thought, but those I suggest are instruments that hundreds of millions people are already using all over the world.

Now, if we consider that less than ten years ago these instruments not even existed, that new born babies, at least for the time being, don’t access to internet, that a lot of people have problems like diseases, poverty, hunger and other pains in the neck, what remains? Simply all! And then, considering that I meet in these sessions people comforted by high instruction levels , what should I  resolve? Maybe that learning and improving harm to adaptation abilities? If it was true, considering future changes, we’d be in a bad situation!

It is a mental and no more a technological matter,  because the “machine” approached us, “we are the machine”. And if it is a mental matter, then I recover from the waste bin the different pieces that will never arrive to “instruction for use” and I piece them together.

To well cultivate our connections, we have to think to “I care” written by Don Milani on a Barbiana’s school door. That writing represents a genial future projection. All that exist in the world does concern us, because physical reality, terrestrial ecosystem, human community, knowledge are immense connection’s materials [1].

“Things”, “contents” materialize thanks to these weaving’s plots and everything’s existence, included everyone of us and specially all our minds, exist and get rich thanks to its connections with all the rest of the world. Don Milani’s “I care” remembers us that our existence’s potential fuels its self only through attention to outside world and sharing.

In Don Milani’s school, in fact, school and life coincided: school started waking up and finished falling asleep, educating in this way young people to a lifelong learning attitude. It was a  transverse school where in every conversation and in every moment a connection, a hyperlink, could materialize towards an other subject. It was the school made by students, in which those who were ahead didn’t go on well over the others but rather used their more advantageous positions to help those who were behind them, helping also their selves because the student who tries to explain something to another person doesn’t waste time, but he improves his knowledge [2]. Today we talk about sharing. It was a school opened and permeable to external world (openness) where everyone could be invited to talk, even relevant cultural and political personalities. Nevertheless, whatever invited person’s rank and prestige were, this person should respect the work in progress, inserting himself in the class like an equal person (peering). It was the school that sent its students learning abroad, in a real languages and culture’s learning contest (acting globally).

On line life can reveal an extraordinary experience if lived like don Milani’s children lived school. Staying on line to grow, to learn, in a process where the one that learns is the protagonist who shapes his learning ambient as regards the project that he proposed to do.

The one that learns is a man who cultivates with love and patience his own connections’ garden. An image that past time has also a stand in between didactic technologies, yes, really a stand in because the imagine is as rich as fragile, while the “mainstreaming information” arena, where technologies compete to gain potential markets’ attention, is a rough and summary place. This stand in is the Personal Learning Environment (PLE).

PLE is one of the last of numerous inventions, each with its own acronym. Probably lots of people think that PLE is a software application, maybe a web service or anyway a thing that can be used or bought, but it isn’t so.

PLE is an ambient where we can live a learning experience. It isn’t a web site, it isn’t a platform, it isn’t a Content Management System (LMS).

It is not even a thing that you can find at school, hardly ever, except for some rare and precious exceptions. This assertion can seem a contradiction in terms because school should be the place where we go learning what we need to get into society. In reality school instruct but don’t promote learning. John Medina [3], a well known researcher in development molecular biology, writed:

“If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom”.

School life takes place almost always in a classroom. The rest takes place at home but nothing changes, people sit again to carry out a predestined homework sequence. Rigidity reigns.

This model has an important consequence for PLE: it is the same for everybody. School proposes, rather imposes, a totally personal studying ambient, a “Classroom Learning Environment” that is meant to round to a common standard, to a “School Learning Environment”.

Personalization toward single students ends in the single marks that express student’s adaptation ability to “School Learning Environment”, a skill that sooner or later will reveal widely not related to skills necessary in real life. PLE represents, instead, a personal learning ambient, necessarily different for each person.

Those who are seriously devoted to didactic innovation are thinking that it is the time to make the professors “go out” from their classroom, that has already been a place of representation of a very partial and more and more distorted reality [4], [5].

Places where students sit down in compliance to school regulation while they are away with their minds, away connected with outside world, with their personal world, with their own “personal environment” , that is different from “personal learning environment”.

We can talk badly about this case, and probably often with very good reasons, but limiting ourselves in a condemnation isn’t sufficient. Mass phenomenon, when they occur, simply exist, and this has a planetary dimension.  It is better to make an effort and get on with it, facing the news in a positive way.

To start, let’s try reasoning in a not negative way. Young people don’t pass so much time on line because they are dissolute or degenerated, but because knowledge society’s citizens do that and our society is quickly transforming in a knowledge society. We have to understand this term.

Knowledge society doesn’t mean that its citizens are wise, but that knowledge is shared in a pervasive way and that it is easily accessible to everybody contrary to the past, when knowledge was scarcely accessible and confined in limited paces. Not only knowledge is available for everyone, but everybody can contribute to produce it. The authority that derives from knowledge production is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation; in the past authority was exclusively granted from rules, in a credited and hierarchical organization.

Certainly lots of people will turn up their nose to a similar vision. We aren’t saying however that the new authority model will replace the traditional one, but only that  the authority concept is diversifying. IBM managers have shown they have perfectly understood it, when in 2001 they financed Linux introduction in their systems, to reintroduce two years later patents for forty millions dollars in the open source software arena. Similar operations are been carried out by other big firms in very different areas, mutatis mutandis, getting sensational outcomes, absolutely unforeseeable, following the traditional judgment rules.

At the base of similar operations there is the implicit recognition of a sort of “shared authority” existence in the net and, secondly, the liberation of a certain quota of the firm’s intellectual property against a major coming back in the net , identified like the necessary substrate for a vital and cheap ecosystem.

Today knowledge is available everywhere and it is not mere information. If it was only this, it’d be just a quantity matter as probably it is retained by public opinion, that assimilates internet to an immense information archive, devoid of any order, in which there can’t be any hope to extract something good from a mediocrity ocean.

The big news has instead a quality nature: while before masses could make use of information only through media, today masses can express themselves.

Just like always, opposite to the new the world splits in sceptical and enthusiastic . Sceptical are surely indignant opposite to the free diffusion of opinions that aren’t submitted to any sieve type and they can’t consider internet but a place where slovenliness and multitude join together in a devastating union.

However we should have understood that a new thing never presents just one face and of course there should be some positive aspect, we have only to pick and work on them. Only us with our actions can give value to the instruments, that themselves are neither good nor bad.

Masses can express because everybody can write his thoughts , purpose his images, his sounds, comment other people’s contents, classify it, call for help to resolve a problem, find a solution to a someone else’s problem etc etc. Besides by now not only individuals actively cooperate in internet’s knowledge production, but also firms and even some very big firms, like for example IBM, Procter & Gamble, Goldcorp.

The fact that internet is becoming very quickly the natural knowledge place represents an extraordinary opportunity to make an operation that we should have completed a long time ago: transforming “personal environment” in PLE.

Here, with the aim to avoid cliché attracting power, in particular the fact that attention focuses all on technology, I’d like to make a backward step, a two centuries backward step.

Had Giacomo Leopardi got a PLE?

It seems a fool question with a banal answer: certainly not, how could he without a computer, without net, feed…

Instead yes, Giacomo Leopardi had a PLE, I mean, he had his own connection gardens and he also could cultivate them very well!

Giacomo Leopardi had at his disposal the library made by his father Monaldo, an extraordinary occasion that consented him and his brothers  to establish innumerable connections with authors from all over the world and from all eras.

We are not dealing obviously with electronic connections, but this is a marginal fact because connection value can be found in that part of the world it refers to, neither connections with past lives should seem limited. I remember how in on line course Connectivism & Connective Knowledge, a funny discussion took place, originated from the question: is having connection with dead persons possible?

The connection with a past author seems to have the one way limit because author can’t answer, but it isn’t exactly like this. Reading an author’s opera and bibliography is something that looks like a dialogue.

How can we therefore deny that Giacomo Leopardi had his own PLE, even if in the form of  a library and of a father willing to keep it alive for his sons, a sort of internet ante litteram. How could he write when he was 15 the Astronomy Story [6] if his father Monaldo didn’t write to his brother-in-law who was in Rome:

“He is restless in reading Johann Friedrich Weidler’s astronomy story. He looked for it in province but with no result. I ask you to look it up there and to obtain it at any price, and, if it        couldn’t be bought, obtain it at least on loan for a little time.”

However, library and paternal attention, even if they were an extraordinary case, would have been insufficient to build a PLE able to justify Leopardi’s opera. The square opposite his house and the things that went on it have been fundamental elements of his PLE. The house in front of  which he heard Teresa Fattorini singing, Recanati streets, industrious people’s images and sounds, life in surrounding fields, the street to the summer house, all these things formed a connection’s weft without which we couldn’t have known his most beautiful poetries.

All of this made Leopardi’s PLE. Of course, an extraordinary PLE, cultivated with passion and tenacity all life long. But every man had his own PLE. Every man,  also Lucy, who lived more than 3 millions years ago, had her own PLE, and it was also very important that Lucy cultivated her PLE with care, to reduct the possibility to be eaten in the first passing fair.

What is the difference, then, between PLEs that human beings form during their life and the internet era ones? Nothing much in the substance, but a lot in the potentiality.

Leopardi was luckier (with regard to this) than his contemporaries for the extraordinary connections availability that he enjoyed. That’s right, we are equally lucky. Having internet availability is like having Monaldo’s library, or better still, much more.

The connections provided by his library were almost all with dead people, the alive ones he had to look for in the rustic life that surrounded him. We can establish connections of every type in internet, with dead and alive persons. Also with persons with which we could share great ideas, passions and purpose communions that we could never otherwise achieve.

Who knows what Leopardi wouldn’t give to achieve other similar spirits, when those rooms which had represented a fantastic connection source, revealed a golden prison.

I hope at this stage to have described with sufficient clarity PLE, greasing the cold acronym with the suitable richness and deepness of the concept it represents. If the reader assures me that he won’t forget  this richness, we can risk saying that technically speaking , for what concerned with internet, PLE is nothing else but a pack of feeds kept in a adder, that is a proper web service that anybody can learn to use in a few minutes. Feeds are nothing else but web addresses given by every site, that , once introduced in their own adder, consent to verify in every moment in which sites, between those introduced in the pack, there is something new. A very simple mechanism that consents easily to keep control of a big number of sources.

Here you are, this is the little mouse I have given birth to, it seems to me that there isn’t much more to say about technical matters.

In case, the mechanism is so simple that we run the risk to surpass the threshold of what can be followed with reason. Maybe this usually happens for all our other connections, doesn’t it? It is important what Carlo Columba writes with regard to this:

“I discovered that PLE isn’t traceable one and for all! If we liked to trace it for all our active life, it’d result something enormous and it’d require a disproportionate time quantity. Here-hence the decision to concentrate attention on “present” PLE, the last year’s one, for example. Maybe the next year I will do another one, certainly different from the present one.”

Just like that, next year will be different, but next month it’ll be already changed. The way Carlo presented schematically his own PLE is important, but it would be a mistake saying that it’s the right way.

Everyone has his own PLE and his personal way to imagine it in every moment, the important thing is having the perception of its importance and learning taking care of it. For example, I imagine it separated in categories that are distinct on the basis of connection’s emotive nature. I try to take a picture limiting myself at connections concerned with what I am writing.

There are connections with those who I could call elder brothers or teachers, who increase with time and which are never forgotten. These give the necessary light to illuminate the others. Then there are connections with travel and school pals, those with younger brothers, students for examples, like leaves that every year renew themselves, and at last connection with our own ambient, with our roots.

Between elder brothers, the online cardinal points are characters who I feel closed to and that often express or are realizing what I perceive or only indicate. They are the persons who we aim to follow because we can imagine that they keep good track. They all have in common the feature to be “little academic”, surely in the sense that we intend academic in Italy. They are examples of fools like we can see described in the video “Think different”, persons who are not prisoners of their role and of their status when they have to use the occasion to change something in better.

Stephen Downes  is a Canadian researcher who looks after “online learning”, new media, pedagogy and related philosophical aspects. Clay Burrel is an American teacher who teaches English since eight years in Asiatic international schools. Micheal Wesch, a cultural anthropology teacher at Kansas University. Both Burrel and Wesch are well known for their didactic experiment’s interest. David Wiley,  teacher of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University, looks after Open Educational Resources.

The offline cardinal points are contemporary authors. For example, Fritjof Capra [1], which I discovered thanks to the online course on connectivity and from whose work I’m out by the handful. Or the director Mike Figgis, who in “Digital Film-Making,” writes [7]:

“Unless you create an environment where people enjoy the working experience, the chances of making a good film are minimal … In making my films, I’ve made it my business to make the actors to feel engaged with the camera.”

I believe that the value of this statement is universal, mutatis mutandis. I might say, to paraphrase, that “unless you create an environment where students enjoy the learning experience, the chances of achieving significant learning are minimal … In making my courses, I’ve made it my business to make the students feel engaged with their learning .

Dealing with the cardinal points of the past, the matter is complicated because they are too many! I will limit myself to those that have emerged spontaneously in this article, and thus need not be explained further: Leopardi, Pirandello, Don Milani.

The fellow travelers are people who I have met sharing with them learning and sailing experiences, perhaps in different ways, pointing to similar directions. These are all people I met online but with some of these we then personally met.

Often nice and profound human relationships, very lovely connections born and mainly developed in the network. Necessary to not feel alone.

Even the students help me develop my own PLE, a big part of it. I learn a lot from my students. The thousands of blogs that I go through are an extraordinary melting pot of humanity and serendipity.

Among the students there are all those who frequent the “blogclass” this semester but also those of previous semesters, even though the impact of the latter scheme with time. However, some of these students finally enter the number of travel companions, my friends.

There is a branch of recent or latent connections, I could say incubating, the only that point to sites instead of people. They are incubating because I suspect that sooner or later they will reveal the presence of a friend and then maybe a traveling companion.

Finally there are the connections with my own environment, with the people I live with, with my animals or with my plants. Caring for a pet teaches a lot. Observing and trying to understand their behavior you learn a lot about humans and their relationship with the relentlessly changing things.

I wanted to describe my PLE, one as many, including all types of connections such as books, personal knowledgements, or maybe suddenly surfaced memories reveled under a new light. Only like that it makes sense to speak of PLE and the only like that you can understand the enormous positive potential of online connections.

This is why I expanded to connect with Don Milani in the graphical representation of the PLE. I got to know his work through a friend, about thirty years ago. I was reading his scriptures and was astonished by his “Lettera a una professoressa”. That book made me remember a piece of my adolescence, as if I could clearly see through a hole in the canvas that blurs memories.

I was just one of 30,000 Pierini of the year! Precisely one of those in the class of ’55. Son of the doctor. Just one of those sent to school a year early and skipping the first by entering directly into the second class of elementary school at six years. Suddenly all the hate I had for the elementary school came clear.

I was a proud boy. I hated knowing that my results were spoilt! There was a trick, I was not playing on equal terms with my fellow schoolmates. This made of me a different person to all the rest.

On the school report at the end of elementary you could read (1965): “…He is particularly attracted by the scientific disciplines, in which the parents constantly help him ….”

They had even put in writing what I thought an unfair advantage!

I remember the names of many of my school and games mates, with whom I had to pass the filters of school, the same for all, where the conditions were just too unfair.

My primary need was to be integrated in the group while my school results were a secondary task. It was then that, a year later (in middle school), I had become one of the most troubled boys of the school and was sent home and suspended three times in one year.

Head down, I was brought home by the school keeper, for the surprise of my mother and of everyone else… What is happening to this once educated boy?…Simple, I needed to feel like the others who obviously had less luck than me. I was trying to earn some bad luck.

Reading “Lettera a una professoressa” about twenty years later, I recognized the value of the burning complaint which before I would not have been able to describe, but which I had tried directly in the part of Peter.

Still hate the intellectual diatribe on the relationship between Don Milani and ‘68 or similar disquisition. What he criticized was a school made for a few and as such unable to reach its striking social mission.

A couple of years ago, I discovered by chance the Web pages Schikshantar, a research organization that aims to radically rethink the training in India:

“After fifty years of so-called development efforts, and despite great scientific advancements, India (and the rest of the world) finds itself mired in a paralyzing socio-cultural, environmental and spiritual crisis – overwhelming in its scale, intensity and rate of growth.

While education has been framed as the cure to this crisis, in reality, the factory model of schooling is part of the problem. Around the world, education systems have become commercialized ‘businesses’ which serve to stratify society, glorify militarism, devalue local knowledge systems and languages, manufacture unsustainable wants, breed discontent and frustration, stifle creativity, motivation and expression, and dehumanize communities. The 19th-century model of factory-schooling today stands in the way of building organic learning societies for the 21st century.”

Among these pages, I discovered that you can freely download an English translation (pdf) of “Lettera  a una professoressa”[8] with a wonderful afterword by Lord Boyle of Handsworth, a member of the British House of Commons and former Minister of Education of the United Kingdom, an afterword written in 1970 in the form of a letter from a former minister of one of the oldest democracies in the “School of Barbiana Dear”, a non-institutional school, made by a priest to about twenty farm worker’s sons.

There is a lot to learn here for a country that twenty years later expresses a “cultural debate” in which appears an article entitled “Don Milani, that scoundrel” (Sebastiano Vassalli, La Repubblica, 30 June 1992) [8].

Shortly after, participating the online course on Open Educational Resources held by David Wiley in the autumn of 2007, I happened to suggest a reflection on the story of Barbiana in the context of a series of considerations on the right to education in third world countries and the connection of this with the enjoyment of human rights. David Wiley highly appreciated this suggestion and it is a beautiful thing that it has been possible to bring the story of Barbiana so far and in such a significant and relevant way.

Finally, I would like to remember how four concepts – mentioned in this written – regarding the school Barbiana, openness, sharing, peering, and acting globally, are the four basic elements on which the Wikinomics (the economy that exploits the mass collaboration) is founded. Four concepts emerged naturally in Barbiana that we can find in the strategic plans of the Research & Development division of the largest corporations in the world!

Online and offline connections, connections with the past and with the present all come together to form something that gives and takes from our minds.

The ease of online connections is an extraordinary opportunity, an opportunity that can be taken only changing our own character towards the world: we must always be ready to learn. At the same time, learning derives from the capacity of taking connections, as the President Václav Havel has said in the opening speech at the Forum 2000 in Prague:

“Education is the ability to perceive the hidden connections between phenomena.”

[1] Capra, Fritjof, The Web of Life, Flamingo, London, 1997

[2] It is worth remembering the case of Finland, which was the first countries in PISA ranking (see the summary of results) on the quality of teaching in secondary schools. Finns commented: “According to the survey, the strength of the Finnish school system is that it guarantees equal learning opportunities regardless of social background. Instead of comparison between pupils, the focus is on supporting and guiding pupils with special needs. Very few children need to repeat grades.” In Italy, countries that covers one of the last positions in PISA ranking, we fear that the children of immigrants will reduce the performances of our children.

[3] Medina, John, pp. 5, Brain Rules, Pear Press, Seattle, 2008

[4] Michael Wesco recently wrote a nice article on the task. Wesco Michael is known in the hole world for educational experiments of great interest that he is making with his students. He is a professor of cultural anthropology at the Kansas University. In 2008 he was awarded the National Professor of the Year Award from the Carnegie Foundation.

[5] John Abbott and Heather MacTaggart’s, Overschooled but Undereducated: Society’s Failure to Understand Adolescence, Continuum Books, London, in print: the introduction is available.

[6] Giacomo Leopardi, Margherita Hack, Storia dell’Astronomia, Edizioni dell’Altana, Roma, 2002.

[7] Figgis, Mike, Digital Film-Making, p. 104, Faber and Faber, London, 2007

[8] Scuola di Barbiana, Lettera a una professoressa, quarant’anni dopo, Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, Firenze, 2007.

Traduzione di Elisa Cecchi e Giulia Sereni