I’m a big fan of connectivism (small ‘c’) in part because it is not a coherent theory of learning. Much more usefully, it is a situated set of principles, observations, perspectives and suggestions about how to learn, given the conditions that are made possible through the read-write web. It’s thus a theory (using the term a little loosely but, I think, accurately) of how to learn, given a particular set of conditions, not a theory of learning. This is an important distinction that is most visibly explicit in its constructionist values – you have to create and share stuff, not just because that’s actually a good way to learn but, at least as importantly, because a learning network can have no value or content unless people actually share and create. It’s how you do it, not what it is. Similarly for the cultivation of your network – it’s a way of going about it, not a theory of learning. This is about how to use the network for learning, not learning itself.
Connectivism, as George Siemens formulated it, provides principles, models and techniques that, if applied, can help us to learn in a large-network context. George gave us a way of thinking about a related set of ideas that are relevant to structuring the learning process in a networked age. The process of learning in a connectivist account cannot be seen simply as something done in isolation nor just as something done through intentional group processes, but as a process of navigating and sense-making in a distributed complex adaptive system, in which that system, including its emergent as well as its designed properties, plays a first-class role in supporting, enabling and reifying learning (and the converse – mobs can be stupid as much as crowds can be wise). It is a context where more is different. George gave voice, shape and a name to a paradigm shift that was occurring and had been occurring for a decade or more before he started writing about it, including such things as communities of practice, distributed cognition, uses of complexity theory, heutagogy, constructionism, knowledge reification, knowledge gardening and much much more. My own PhD, started in 1997, was about very much this kind of thing and I was a very long way from being the first in the field (in fact I was quite peeved when George came up with such a good name for what we were doing because I had played with a lot of ‘connect-‘ words in search of a broad defining term, finding all to be unoriginal, without hitting on ‘connectivism’. Darn your brilliance, George!). Such notions were, in their turn, based on earlier visionary thinking from people like Bateson, Hofstadter and Illich, who lacked the adjacent possible of the Internet to make their ideas a reality. These ideas were in the air.
The Landing: Connectivism: a learning theory or a theory of how to learn?.