Connectivism

The idea for connectivism, to encode it my own way, would be that the nature of accessing knowledge has changed drastically with technological advancements so that now, instead of only trusting to indoctrinated experts/researchers and edited publications, we also access knowledge through a variety of instantly gratifying ways which include people (of varying and diasporic knowledge themselves), gadgets (of which Siemens seems to exclude traditional books, but that might be extremely judgmental me) and the internet/gadgets we use to access the web and all its dot numbers.

So how does this all work with what we've learned? This question has filled those hours of doing dishes and trying to fall asleep when the A/C decides it's had a hard day, too. It doesn't seem mutually exclusive with any theory in that it supports the structural building that contructivists support, the behavioristic (almost compulsively so) patterns of behavior that behaviorists might look into, and the bi-polar internal brain workings within a societal/communal environment of postmodernists and other -ists. These thoughts led me to the mind map below.

I focused only on the learning support network. The three most important groupings I could think of were People, Myself, and Technology. I realize that it might seem just a tad egocentric to put myself there, but I still, perhaps archaically, think that the learner (myself) is the most important part of the learning equation (and yes, I see that the learner is invested in all the limiting elements of a particular society or culture, but that's the background of the mindmap, not a separate resource. To quote one of my favorite teaching experts, I am the source, all these other things I use are my resources.)

People: I started out with experts because, when I'm learning in a formal way, I like to be able to have an expert - hence my willingness to pay tuition, right? That seemed obvious. Educators, myself included, rely on researchers and theorists and the publications of these groups. I also have learned and continue to enjoy learning from colleagues and peers when we are focusing specifically on educational matters. But then I thought about how often I talk to my colleagues, family and friends, students and others about these issues, and I learn a lot about other values. Getting to know the students and seeing how others are problem solving had taught me a lot. None so much as dealing with my own children at home about how every child is unique and how different generations (even a few years' difference) can change the way people think - or at least what they will relate to easily. Finally, I am an observer all the time, so I rely on my own observations and theories to problem solve and challenge my preconceived notions of life in general.

Technology is opening up to me. I've never been intimidated, but there have been times where I felt like something was brand new and students or colleagues had been using it for ever. There have also been areas of technology - blogging, for instance - where I kinda know about it but, because of something one of my closest friends refers to as "Tyranny of the Urgent," I needed some outside source to prompt me to fully investigate it. That said, the computer is probably the single most important technological source. It has this nifty internet that - much to some students' surprise, is not just for entertainment after all! There are thousands of resources such as blogs, wikis, wikipedia (I know, as a starting point only), databases, publications, history, humanity, etc. The TV, phone, and recording devices deserve credit here - I am such a Discovery Channel and History fan that they ought to pay me for PR.

The "thing" that matters here, though, is me. It's my experiences and my previous learning that allows me to connect this information in meaningful ways (and then re-present this encoded learning). It's my other, non-related knowledge from the History Channel or that Ursula LeGuin novel that allows me to make up metaphors and mnemonic devices and models (or borrow others') that allows me to retain information (and pass it along). It's me choosing to identify myself as a learner and taking time to reflect (as opposed to just zoning out in front of a sit com) that makes the information stick in my brain, related to lots of different little branches in the magic trees that are our brains - which I'm not sure fits with the connectivism theory. It's my own questions that motivate me to find more information, to learn more.

I'm not sure my network has changed the way I learn. It has changed at times the way I access new information, but the basics are still fundamental - I'm reading articles and people's opinions online as much as in books and magazines. I'm listening to web lectures as I listen to my friends and co-workers. I'm watching presentations online as I would watch my latest favorite serial documentary Chasing Mummies. I am even taking the time to reflect on this as I take time to reflect on the last novel I've read. I even caught The Simpsons this evening and enjoyed how the plot related to Orwell's 1984 and marveled at how MLK Jr's famous speech can relate to every kind of stereotyping when Lisa paralleled elements of the speech in her diatribe against stereotyping blondes - and all of you probably get all these references because the concepts of Big Brother and "I Have a Dream" and even the blond stereotype are ingrained in our culture. To take a longer view, I assume I began learning by merely observing and mimicking as all infants seem to do. At some point the habit of learning became ingrained, and all of this network has only added to a learning organization that was already there.

I enjoy the ease of access to information that the web offers. Accessing books online is convenient in a lot of ways (and much less expensive!) but I like that I can pick up our course text book to read at the park while the kids roam and I don't have to worry about things like the battery in a laptop dieing. As Jurassic as this probably makes me sound, my phone is for conversations and the occasional text or digital picture when I forget my camera. Instantly looking up something is not of much interest to me since I can set something on my back burner and get around to it later. There's usually something else I need to focus on in the now.

Which brings me to the next point for pondering: How do I get new knowledge when I have questions. How don't I? It is entirely dependent on the situation. I ask questions. I try to problem solve. I make a mental note and later refer to some resource whether digital or not. I have even been known, when faced with an especially difficult quandary, to sit myself down and write until an answer occurs to me, or call a friend to discuss - although, I probably wouldn't do this for the average math problem.

My personal support system does not refute the concept of connectivism as a phenomenon of modern civilization. Information is spread out between people and caches of all shapes and models. Our access to such information is ridiculously easy when compared to such access even 25 years ago. But. Connectivism moves the focus of learning from individual understanding in the interest of conceptualizing the complexity of knowledge. It's interesting, but a system-based and visualized knowledge doesn't really seem new to me - visualizing and re-visualizing is something we do anyway, we connect knowledge to other knowledge in internal schema anyway, the most complex systems we have are still typically understood a little bit at a time anyway. It's nice to have a name or -ism for it, I suppose.