Connectivism: Enhancing our Disciplines, not Stealing Our Thunder

One tenet I think will stick with me from Connectivism is that the "capacity to know is more critical than what is already known" (Siemens). This simultaneously seems so radical and so common-sense.  Was there ever a time when what was known was more important than the skill to learn more? Did this differ based on discipline? A part of me wants to argue that skills and application have always been the true purpose/power of education: teachers just didn't necessarily utilize it that way. But maybe I'm biased, because I'm an English major. We don't major in English because we want to be able to tell you all about Woolf and Tolstoy and Shelley: we major in English because it makes us sharp interpreters of all sorts of text, purposeful writers, and strong communicators. The skills are the reward: the readings and assignments themselves are just how you develop those skills. I remember doing a project in my high school Precalculus class where we had to explain why we learned certain types of math. I was given verifying trig identities, and I remember my teacher being very excited because I talked about how this type of math really teaches perseverance, creativity, problem-solving, and pattern identification. In this class, too, the point wasn't really being able to do math: it was in the skills that math problem-solving helps the student master.

So I would argue that the skills--those higher Bloom's levels--have always been the most important parts of any lesson. I think perhaps what has changed in the educational landscape isn't *what's* important so much as it is to what degree it's important. The skills were always more important than the knowledge, but now we are at a point where the knowledge feels especially pointless, and where the skills are the only things students can really count on, going forward. I would also argue that while the ability to *access* knowledge is a much more important skill now (even though it was always important), that there are still other skills that are just as important as being able to access information. For instance, I'm still an English major, and I will probably always believe that the ability to write well and persuasively is one of the greatest things we can teach our students. It empowers them to make an impact on their world. Now, of course, technology and the ability to access information adds to that ability, and many of the activities we discussed with integrating technology also feature persuasive writing, but it is a different skill than the "capacity to know more than what is already known." While I think this part of Connectivism is great to remember as a teacher--it will remind me to focus more on processes than on merely remembering/understanding information--I think it's also important to remember/think about the other skills that students will still need in the future. Our subjects have all always taught something beyond the baseline knowledge level, and I'd bet that those skills will never go obsolete.

I found this pretty cute video about what Connectivism looks like in the classroom. I think this is a good starting point for thinking about how Connectivism/tech integration is one way that we enhance the amazing skills that our students already learned in our disciplines. This has really helped me process how Connectivism/teaching tech doesn't take over our classroom or our disciplines. It's a way that we open up our disciplines, redefine how students learn the essential skills of our discipline, and make sure that they will be able to carry these skills with them in a rapidly-changing future.