I agree with Group A’s Connectivism Wiki in many respects. Technology has definitely had an amazing impact on the amount of information now available, as well as the delivery of that information. Moreover, the number of technological tools and their implications in education grows seemingly exponentially each year. I liked how the group showed a relationship between constructivism and connectivism. Knowledge is still being constructed, but in the current, digital age, non-human devices like computers assist in that construction and even take it to a higher level.
Since I am not an educational theorist (by ANY stretch of the imagination), the debate over whether or not connectivism is truly a “learning theory”, and the reasons why it is or is not, are not very important to me. Still, I agree with the idea that we are “stewards of technology.” That concept is extremely relevant to my position as a school librarian: I guide students in the use of technology to find relevant, current, unbiased information; I model/teach the use of many different technology tools, which students can then employ to demonstrate their learning; we communicate via email, wikis, and webpages as a learning community; and I introduce new technologies to staff for their instructional/professional/collaborative use.
I also agree that there is a very strong interconnectivity between teaching and learning. (We had a discussion yesterday at lunch about brain research, how teaching is learning, and how important it is to give our students the opportunity to teach us and/or their peers) as a way to show their learning. I appreciate being introduced to connectivism and to the idea that people who study education for a living feel that current learning theories do not take into account today’s digital age. Teachers are no longer the fountains of knowledge that spew content out of our brains into the minds of our students. We all know that there is simply too much information now available to “know it all” and transfer it to groups of very diverse learners from the front of the classroom. However, we can help our students become information literate and teach them how to use current digital technologies to help create new learning.
I’m glad you found the points we presented in our wiki agreeable, Debby. The more I read about connectivism, the more I was glad that I hadn’t been assigned to compose a wiki against it; like you, I definitely see it at work in today’s teaching climate and I’m behind its basic ideas.
Additionally, I’m struck by your statement that, “teaching is learning”. I think we’d be hard-pressed to find a teacher who doesn’t agree with that sentiment, but it’s not something that we often stop to consider, is it? Even without web 2.0 technologies, I don’t think learning was ever as linear as some theories would like us to believe. Knowledge was bestowed from teacher to student, yes, but it seems to me a cold, hard fact that a day doesn’t go by when our students don’t teach us something- whether it be a new, deeper understanding of the material we are guiding them through or a new perspective on something that we hadn’t thought of before.
Thanks, Elizabeth… last week’s module was difficult, at least for me, because it required researching connectivism, then doing more research to uncover the opposing point of view. And, I am so NOT into educational theory and philosophy….
As for my statement.”teaching IS learning”, I wasn’t really thinking about teachers when I wrote that, although of course as educators we learn so much from our students each day. Students also learn by teaching their classmates. It’s one thing to fill out a worksheet or complete a spelling test for the classroom teacher; it’s quite another for a student to explain a concept to a classmate. When they have to teach their peers what they have learned, I think that takes their learning to a higher, more profound level.