Connecting People aka Connectivism

Hello everyone!🙆

Today I would like to talk about trends in education and the importance of connections🙀. Don't worry it is not an article about nepotism and criminal affairs in the filed of education, it is about how we learn today.

Also, I would like to give you a short review on George Siemens's article "Connectivism: A learning Theory for the Digital  Age", which has shifted my vision of what teaching and learning look like in current times.

This year I have done a postgraduate course on Blended Learning. I don't want to load your brain with heavy academical definition of what it is, but would shortly describe it as a mix of online and offline learning. This connection of learnings has become a ground for a learning theory called Connectivism, which according to G. Siemens is "the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories"😵😲 speaking in close-to-human language Connectivism is an educational theory about how people "connect to the information in other people and appliances, such as computers and databases", simply speaking it is a believe that people learn through contact.

Let's consider an example:

After having read the book by Bonnie Garmus "Lessons in Chemistry" about a hardship of being a woman scientist in early 1960s, Jane, a first year student at Law university, becomes eager to know more about those times and if the book is based on true (shocking for her) facts. 

Where can she find the information? She decides to start with Google, which obviously gives a zillion  websites with different kind of sources related (may be not) to the topic. As a law student she knows the axiom that to form an opinion one must appeal to a reliable source. So she opts for the hardcopy historical books and journals from the university library. In the library she meets a sophomore student doing some research on feminism, who directs her to some reliable websites to dig the information, where she finds some good pieces and the comments of other students, which give her a clue where to explore next. This brings her to American Association of University Women‎, which leads her to Women and Girls Lead Global and many other global organizations. To crown it all, Jane decides to write to the author of the book and ask her some questions about her creation, who in turn introduces Jane to three elderly women taken as a prototype of the mane heroine. Now, Jane has a Masters Degree in Human rights.

The Moral of the story: to learn something profoundly one needs connections 😁, funny, but yes, in nowadays world to learn we need to be able to self-organize ourselves to explore in the chaos and complexity of information, to navigate well in the networks = make connections not only with people but also among sources of knowledge.