Connectivism according to George Siemens

http://www.connectivism.ca/

So this is where it starts for me, a dive into the heart of what George Siemens (coiner of the term “connectivism”) might think about connectivism these days. I don’t think I’ll tarry here for long, because there have been such juicy discussions with my thinker-friends on Facebook that I want to return to those, but it’s good to get a first-hand glance at what George is chewing on at the moment, written in his blog on November 10, 2009.

It appears that in his latest blog he’s summarized a few “thumbs up/thumbs down” kinds of things comparing the old and the new worlds of learning, and so I’ll bring them into my own blog here to get the mental juices flowing. As an aside, it strikes me as interesting that he’s based very much in the world of technology, while connectivism seems to me to be so much about ecology.

First off, GS seems to say that “connect or perish” will be the motto for the future. Organizing our world according to content (like Google) is outdated, whereas organizing our world according to connections (like Facebook) is where it’s at. Similarly, the overwhelming abundance of information (overabundance?) makes any attempts to control information futile. Finally, “complicated” is bad but “complex” is good. Our mission then, should we as educators choose to accept it, is to find a way to manage abundance and complexity (which seems like a contradiction when it is clearly unmanageable).

We have been kidding ourselves, he seems to say. Old ideologies for learning are based on the following (incorrect) assumptions:

1. 1. The learning needed by someone can be defined

2. 2. Control is needed to achieve required learning
3. 3. Students at similar stages need similar learning

4. 4. Coherence and structure are needed for learning

In fact, GS quite overtly states that a “failure to overcome ideologies is due to an inability, to date, of educators to rethink the learning model.” Hmmm. I believe the gauntlet has been thrown.

So what does he suggest? More from his blog …

Education has had enough theorizing (yes, I get the irony). Let’s throw in a dash of pragmatics and see where we end up. In fact, let’s start at the smallest element in the learning process: a connection. Instead of trying to squeeze curriculum into a myriad of epistemological views and adding a splash of psychology and sociology, I suggest we zero in on connections. Biologically, learning is as simple as the firing of neurons. At a conceptual level, learning involves the connecting/weighting/strengthening of links between concepts and ideas. At a social level, learning involves interacting with other individuals (and increasingly, technological agents). How are connections formed? What does a particular constellation of connections represent? How important is technology in enabling connections? What, if anything, is transferred during an interaction between two, three, or more learners? What would learning look like if we developed it from the world view of connections?

These are, indeed, the questions to which I want to find answers.