Connectivism
A while back I ran accross some of the thinking of George Siemens on connectivism - a learning theory really for today’s technological world. Stephen Downes also has some thoughts on connected learning. And I’m sure there are others.
George Siemens has a page that outlines some of the key principles behind connectivism. You can go down the list and see how each of these has important implications for our educational system.
I think the most important one is the one that describes learning as the process of connecting. It seems that the amount of information available to us is growing so rapidly that nobody can possibly know everything about any one topic. What is important is the ability to connect to the people and information sources that can provide us with what we need. How does this relate to schools? It relates to what we teach. And unfortunately, being a system driven by standards and testing, we continue to focus on facts, predominantly useless facts, instead of providing our students with the skills and opportunities to make those connections.
In what ways do you see your schools focusing on the minutia of the content areas and not the greater skills that allow students to see connections across these content areas, evaluate information and solve problems with it? What factors keep us entrenched in such a model? What things can we do to propel us out of a destructive model?
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