Some participants in #CCK11 seem to take offense at the use of the term “ideology” to describe connectivism. But I think they are mistaken. <\/p>\n
In fact I think there’s nothing derogatory about it, and regardless of whether or not I am right about their status as scientific theories<\/a>, I will be very surprised if most people don’t agree that most Learning Theories have at least a significant ideological component – as suggested by their names<\/a> if nothing else.<\/p>\n After all, an ideology is just a system of related beliefs about values. We all have things we value, and sometimes we find an ideology useful for helping to maintain some sort of consistency in our rankings of them. But our committment to an ideology can be both conditional and flexible. (If it was always absolute then there would be no need for the word “ideologue”.)<\/p>\n One component of my own ideology is a belief in the importance of equity (no Ken not the stock market kind!), and so I tend to prefer approaches which minimize unnecessary inequality of access to resources. (Of course this doesn’t imply expecting strict equality if that would be overall counterproductive, and the question of how much inequality would be inequitable is open to quite a broad range of responses).<\/p>\n