Chaos and Discovery: The Road to Learning

Process and procedure has been the mold to education for many years. Students are instructed and lectured and are simply expected to regurgitate information in the form of an assessment that does not truly capture anything. Learning today should no longer be like this. In a world of technology, learning is a door to chaos and discovery! The learning theory of connectivism captures exactly this, it is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization. What this means for me as an educator is that I must create personalized learning experiences for my students. In this model of learning I would still be in control of structure, but I would turn organization into the hands of students. With advances in technology, there are so many ways in which students can organize their learning. In my chemistry classroom, for example, I envision my students accessing Google Docs to organize lab results. The amazing piece to this is collaboration, I am all about students working together and learning from each other. I want my students to realize that as they make discoveries, they will also run into roadblocks or they will make mistakes, this is the chaos to learning. If we do not learn to fail, then we have failed to learn, it as simple as that.

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