Cost of Connectivism

When I was in 6'th grade, I memorized 30 digits of pi.

     There was no homework or challenge behind my madness, I was just a bored math student.  I try telling that to a junior high student now, and they look at me like I'm from Mars (more than usual, anyway), and ask, "Why???"  Yet from a very young age, I was taught the importance and skills of memorization.  Phone numbers, Bible verses, theorems, etc., anything important I would make myself try to store away for later use.  A trend over the last few years though, is that memorization is quickly fading into the background of relevance for students.  The same can be said for many other skills, like spelling and problem solving.  Something is changing in the way we learn and interact with information, and the way we choose to navigate that as teachers will greatly affect the learning environment.

     Connectivism is the word of the day, and seeing it's ideas, it is no wonder that these aforementioned skills are being pushed to the backburner.  This is the theory of learning governed by networking, connections, and shifting information.  In connectivism, we learn through diversity and opinions, and connections between information and people.  In connectivism, simply knowing something isn't that important; it's your capacity to know and find information.

     I think the amount of stress connectivism has on collaboration and learning from other opinions is an incredibly powerful thing to use in the classroom.  The fact still remains that there are trade-offs to this technology fueled learning style, and as a future teacher, there are two questions that I am wrestling with from this.

How do we communicate to kids that these skills are important?  When you tell a student "You need to know this," how do we engage them when their response is "I can just look it up later." Or how do we make them wrestle with a math problem when the answer is in the back of the book, and seven tutorials are on Youtube?  With events and stories and information around the world accessible in seconds, and all of it stored in our technology, teaching disinterested students our seemingly "outdated" skills presents a whole new challenge.

Are these skills really as important as we think?  With our rapidly changing world, our way of navigating it has to adapt with it.  If the half-life of knowledge really is 18 months right now, are skills like memorizing facts the way to go?  What happens when those things we've stored are shown to be incorrect?  Maybe it's more important to teach students how and where to find information, rather than having them keep it.  There certainly seems to be a place where I will have to concede things that were once important to me, for the sake of the new learning environment students are in.  I can hear Jeff's words, "I'm not saying it's right, but it's the world we live in."



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