Connectivism (Post #2)

I think that the key to learning is to understand that it never stops. The old adage says, "you learn something new every day", I think it’s now out of date. The new adage should be, "you learn something new every hour or even minute", or it could be, "you learn a new way every day".

My personal learning network has grown within the past few years with the addition of e-college, blogs, online libraries, and all of the mobile learning network options.

The biggest reminder for me of the change in learning from a face-2-face (f2f) class lecture style toward a multi plat formed approach happened a few years ago. I took two years off during my bachelor’s degree. When I started my break, almost nothing that was done at the school was done via an online learning environment. When I started back up, 30% or more, of my f2f class utilized the Learning Management System (LMS) that the school had.

Overall for me, although I’m skeptical about blogs and Wikipedia, I find the general content to be helpful for the start of research. Also, I really enjoy not having to drive to a library for books; just a few clicks way is a full online library. When it comes down to the final learning, I don’t think anything beats a college course (online or f2f). If I want to become an expert in learning theory, I could read about it on Wikipedia, find a few blogs or even call up a peer at work but that still wouldn’t work as well as a true college class designed to teach me learning theory!

I think that the core meaning of connectivism is my entire learning network, the thought that we learn though multiple ways and based strongly off of social interactions. Some of the tenants are pretty easy to see how they play into social interactions. For example Facebook, blogs, text messaging and so on. Other tenant maybe harder to see, like how television can be a social learning tool, yet when think how times a day you say, “I was watching TV the other day and I…” it shows how social TV can really be.

Lastly I found this story very connected to the future of learning:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124695289