Freedom to work at your own pace can be a good thing but I'm having some difficulty motivating myself to complete my final project in this course. I've been tossing around the ideas for my final project for some time but decided that this evening was as good a time as any to sketch them out in my bogus blog.
Here's the premise:
The idea for this project came to light when I was reading Jones and Bronack in Gibson et. al., 2006. They assert that "Knowledge, according to social constructivists, is the artifact of decisions made by people in groups, based on their on-going interactions. In a sense, knowledge is a public record of transactions between like-minded people."
While Jones and Bronack's quote seems harmless enough it potentially explains scientific discovery, war, parties, establishment of any consensus group and virtually any activity involving group consensus or group identification with an individual or thought pattern.
Can we mimic consensus behavior in a simulative, real-time environment; i.e. Second Life?, what can we learn from the interaction between students engaged in such activity? and what can students learn from participating in such an environment about the good and bad that is inherent when engaging in group collaboration?
As a side topic, I think it might be worth exploring for another paper or an extension of this one whether or not all formal education is rooted in consensus and if so, how does this affect our ability to truly think independently without being ostracized by the group?
Some of these thoughts are continuing to develop as a result of last Thursday's session in SL and my initial readings in a book titled "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" Kuhn, 1962. Dr. Gibson suggested this reading for me back in week 5. Kuhn is working towards establishing the proof for Jones and Bronack's (I'm sure Kuhn wrote long before Jones and Bronack) knowledge as a social construction supposition and seems to make quite a good point that there is not only group consensus that exists most of the time but occasionally group dissension that sets the wheels in motion for revolutionary knowledge altering discoveries.
The next challenge is whether or not these observations are reconcilable through my favorite ID theory. I had proposed, and continue to propose the theory by the Kamradt's with my own customizations.
More to come -
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