You may treat my ATM metaphor as follows:
ATM – denotes Computers – hardware/software, etc any internet, ICT, Learning Management Systems (LMS), Search Engines, Web 2.0 tools – blogs, social networking tools: Youtube, Myspace, wiki, Ning, Delicious, Twitter & Tweeter, FB, and many others emergent technologies or tools like Cloud computing, Mobiles, (non-human appliances).
Money – denotes the resources resided on the internet or social networks (or even our own networks (brain?, conceptual networks?) if there are connections and interactions of these networks)- information, links, articles, extracts, aggregates of “knowledge” or any artifacts – on-line or hard copy of books, e-portfolios etc. So fake money could include fake information, incorrect information or spam.
However, you could also use abstract concept of these like virtual ATM, virtual money (such as internet banking) to represent the concepts behind learning – the immersive virtual learning ecology and SL with Linden as the Money etc.. This could be linked to all the learning concepts as introduced by Stephen Downes – where learning is ontology, non-propositional, emergent, and a continuous process that DOES NOT MEAN the acquistion of knowledge BUT merely as a networking process….which to me would be another way of looking into learning, from a more CONNECTIVIST and philosophical point of view.
Would this be a “connectivist” approach towards connectivism where all different approaches (all the metaphors suggested as per the posts, including Roy, Ulop, Frances (ANT), and many others from Instructivist, Cognitivist, Constructivist, Connectionist approaches and those of Stephen and Georges’ Connectivism principles are connected and interacted to reveal an emergent pattern of knowledge and learning? I don’t know!
Though there may be a lot of uncommon or “seemingly conflicting” views amongst them, I could see a lot of common grounds connecting them together, just like the metaphor of the digestion system in our human body.
