In the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, King Arthur and his knights must answer three questions to cross the bridge of death and continue their quest.
If only Sir Robin had had an iPhone….
This week I’ve studied the concept of connectivism, a theory holding that in the digital age, knowledge is not learned, but rather accessed and managed via networks which are external to the individual. Learning is the process of bridging “nodes” of knowledge, and having those bridges at the ready when called upon. Poor Sir Robin needed to phone a friend.
In pre-digital days, if I asked you what the capitol of Assyria was, you might have used an encyclopedia, or asked a historian. Nowadays you can easily check Wikipedia from a connected device. You don’t need to store the information in your brain the way Sir Robin did. Connectivism holds that this new circumstance, the nearly limitless on-demand nature of information, eases the pressure to store knowledge in our heads, and favors the skill of forming connections between ourselves and sources of information.
As a consequence of this shift in focus, argues the theory, we have drastically changed how we think and learn. A logical conclusion is that instructional systems should pivot their pedagogy towards harmonizing with this new way of learning.
I have questions. As we guide learners to be “network-builders” won’t we degrade their ability to perform original research? Who will be the generators of new knowledge? What is the nature and quality of the new knowledge humankind is supposedly generating at next-order rates? If learning is self-guided, how will employers or universities discern the value of diplomas?
Who will motivate and reward expertise? Many educational theorists complain that our current pedagogy is built on an industrial model, biased toward preparing workers to serve corporate priorities. I don’t believe this to be true in all current pedagogy. Public schools are still teaching Shakespeare and world history. While traditional academic subjects have both their theoretical and their applied aspects, I would hypothesize that it will require a sophisticated level of “curation” or guidance on the part of teachers to maintain a blend of theoretical and practical study. Young learners gravitate to subjects that have meaning in their immediate lives. Learners living on the low end of Malinkowski’s hierarchy of needs might need more than a little guidance on even the available lines of inquiry.
To be fair, advocates of connectivist pedagogy admit that there is still a need for guidance by experts. Flawed as they may be, current educational practices will need more than what connectivists offer if there is to be a ground-up overhaul of the system.
Excellent post.
“As we guide learners to be “network-builders” won’t we degrade their ability to perform original research?”
I think part of the connectivist argument around this is that learners should know how to perform original research – i.e. know where to look, how to separate the wheat from the chaff, what information to discard as extraneous or inaccurate, how to follow leads, etc. Which is a skillset for the 21st century I can get behind.
However, I fully support your skepticism about the absence of motivation and expertise in this model. Networked learning might work for mid-career learners who know what they’re doing and what information they should be tapping, but applying this to the general populace seems like a recipe for group-think, confusion, misinformation, apathy, false prophets, and general disaster.