Connectivism: Morning Reflection

I am a twenty-six year old master's degree student.  It hasn't been that long since I was in a public school classroom.  I remember school during my senior year, 2008, when text messaging was the ultimate offense and MySpace was the only social media around.  At least in my hometown, technology had yet to rise to a level of significance in the educational experience.  Teaching and learning philosophies still centered around behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism.  

As it turns out, learning philosophies have evolved just as much as the classroom itself.  The education realities that students experience today are just not the same as they were (almost) ten years ago.  With the evolving classroom, a new learning theory has emerged.  Connectivism.  I'll admit that I am a bit of a skeptic when exposed to brand new ideas; however, connectivism sticks.

Connectivism is a hybrid philosophy theorizing that learning occurs by connecting different bits of information to improve our current knowledge.  Much like a nebulous environment of shifting core elements, there is no one piece of concrete knowledge.  Knowledge is forever shifting, changing, and connecting pieces of information from different sources to create a truth.  We obtain knowledge by integrating the diversity of opinions, practicing decision making, utilizing non-human appliances, and finding connections from known data to create new ideas.  

Personally, I view this philosophy as a theory that all knowledge is changing and growing.  To find new truths, we must move away from past "facts" and connect our current knowledge to the bits of new information.  This connection will increase our knowledge capacity and continue our intellectual evolution.  In today's classroom, we should teach children how to apply skills to obtain new information, how to find relevant resources, and how to work together to summarize new ideas.  The "facts" I was supposed to memorize during high school are now just a click away; therefore, I plan to use a connectivist approach to teach kids how to connect documented facts to create new knowledge.