The Learner of Today

        George Siemens pointed out in his article, Connectivism: ALearning Theory for the Digital Age, that the foundational principles of knowledge has been changed and is growing exponentially. With the development of technology and networks, the structures and the manners of learning are changing, such as formal classroom to informal one, separate works to cooperative works, or from a small group to a larger group. Seimens(2005) declared that connections between disparate ideas and fields can create new innovations. Thus, he present a new theory as “connectivism”.

        Then, what is connectivism? According to Seimens, “connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual”. Moreover, in the video What is Connectivism, “knowledge is networked and distributed, which is increasingly aided by technology”.  Based on this idea, I’d like to describe the individual learner as the airport. The internet is the airplane. And the knowledge and information that people learned from others are the passengers of the airplane. Different airports send passengers to different destinations through airplanes. In other words, the individual, as the starting point, uses internet as a tool to exchange information and knowledge with another individual. Gradually, each individual will form their own routine and systemic social network.

        To sum up, applying technology is the trend of teaching and learning in the future. It is necessary for the learners to cultivate an ability to synthesize and recognize the target knowledge from the large amount of information and transfer them to own use.