Category: Learning Theory

Connectivism: a learning theory or a theory of how to learn?

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?.

Motivating Students with Teaching Techniques that Establish Relevance, Promote Autonomy | Faculty Focus

Underachievement in college students is linked to lack of motivation (Balduf, 2009 and references therein). Two major factors that contribute to poor motivation are inability of students to see the relevance of classroom activities to their chosen careers (Glynn et al., 2009) and lack of a sense of autonomy (Reeve and Jang, 2006; Reeve, 2009).

In this article, I provide examples of how I addressed these two issues with activities that promote experiential learning and encourage students to be more active participants in their learning. These techniques were used mainly in science courses but could be adapted to other disciplines.

Motivating Students with Teaching Techniques that Establish Relevance, Promote Autonomy | Faculty Focus.

6 Alternatives To Bloom’s Taxonomy For Teachers –

“At the end of the day, teaching is about learning, and learning is about understanding.

And as technology evolves to empower more diverse and flexible assessments forms, constantly improving our sense of what understanding looks like–during mobile learning, during project-based learning, and in a flipped classroom–can not only improve learning outcomes, but just might be the secret to providing personalized learning for every learner.

This content begs the question: why does one need alternatives to the established and entrenched Bloom’s? Because Bloom’s isn’t meant to be the alpha and the omega of framing instruction, learning, and assessment. Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy does a brilliant job of offering “verbs” in categories that impose a helpful cognitive framework for planning learning experiences, but it neglects important ideas, such as self-knowledge that UbD places at the pinnacle of understanding, or the idea of moving from incompetence to competence that the SOLO taxonomy offers.

So with apologies to Bloom (whose work we covered recently), we have gathered five alternatives to his legendary, world-beating taxonomy, from the TeachThought Simple Taxonomy, to work from Marzano to Fink, to the crew at Understanding by Design.”

6 Alternatives To Bloom’s Taxonomy For Teachers –.