Timeless Education

I'm not even going to try describing exactly what Connectivism is. From my relatively limited amount of research, there seems to be a lot of debate about whether Connectivism is a theory of education, a theory of learning, or even a whole epistemology. For the sake of this post, I'm going to focus on Connectivism as a theory of education (whether that's what it actually is or not) because for me, that's where it finds its most present application.

Generally speaking, Connectivism is an educational theory which proposes that teaching students how to find and evaluate knowledge is more important than teaching them any specific set of collected knowledge. Although Connectivism's epistemological genealogy can be traced from antiquity and up through Piaget and Vygotsky, its real home is the context of the digital age. With so much information so readily available to students today through internet based vehicles, simply delivering content to students is less valuable than it has ever been before. A student in the digital age has little use for a teacher who simply passes on information, since that information along with so much more is only a few keystrokes away.

So what is the role of a teacher in the digital age? This is the question that the educational theory of Connectivism tries to answer. The role of the teacher in the digital age is to teach students how to access information, evaluate information, organize information, and link that information to past, present, and potential future experiences. Rather than being the arbiter of knowledge, in a Connectivist model, the teacher is the guide as the student navigates and builds connections between the pieces of information they discover.

I think there's a lot that can be learned from Connectivism and I think most of what it proposes is useful for the modern educator. In a world that is changing and developing as quickly as ours is, it makes sense to take on an educational approach that is geared toward flexibility. If we educate our students with only opportunities that are available today in mind, they won't be prepared for the opportunities that the world offers them tomorrow. They need to be taught to self-instruct, to be life-long learners, to seek answers for themselves. Our curriculum needs to become a timeless curriculum.

But it is here that we must realize that not everything Connectivism has to offer is new. Teachers across history have sought to make their lessons timeless. Great teachers have always valued problem solving over answer regurgitation, inventiveness over replication, imagination over memorization, discourse over homogeny. In a sense, the profession of teaching, at its best, has always been about the future. As teachers, we want to prepare our students for the future, and as the future is not known, great education has always valued a method that supersedes time. This is not a new idea.

Connectivism is simply modern education's next step in this ancient tradition. And now we get to choose if it's a step we as educators want to take.