Today's Learner

I became very enlighten as I read through George Siemens' article, Connectivism: a learning theory for the digital age (2005) and watching his You Tube video, The Changing Nature of Knowledge (2009). Siemens is able to critically demonstrate his understanding of the learning process, as theorized through behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism, and offer another learning theory based on our present and every-changing digital world. His alternative theory of the learning process through connectivisim offers an "integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories." This suggests that knowledge is readily available through connections, opinions, and ideas of a some what organized fashion in a non-human cyber world. However, it is the learners responsibility to nurture and maintain their capacity to know more through these connections. The empowerment of the learner rests within the decision-making of assigning meaning and understanding of incoming information in the realm of a changing reality. As stated in Siemens' video, The Conflict of Learning Theories with Human Natures: "...learning and the act of knowledge creation is a function of a network," we can understand that one learner cannot isolate and hold all knowledge in themselves, but rather through the act of externalizing our understandings with others can people truly learn and create meaning.

Through this understanding of connectivism, I attempted to create an analogy that could illustrate the learner of today's society and to help create a relationship of this theory and our potential students. This is not an easy task, because I'm not necessarily a great abstract thinker. However, I believe that today's learner is like an Aloe Vera plant. As Siemens' article states: "Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning," the roots of the Aloe Vera plant circulates nutrients allowing the leaves to grow, and sometimes grow rapidly (much like learning). These leaves hold vital medicinal information or just offers information (much like several Internet sources) that when accessed, they can be used for multiple purposes. The leaves of the Aloe Vera plant, can grow exponentially and foster new new pups (or ideas in the technical world). Their environment can vary, inside or outside, much like the sources of external information that can be found in a variety of tools (My Space, blogging, wiki, podcasts, You Tubs, etc.). Much like the Aloe Vera plant, learners of a society can grow exponentially and even though within themselves they hold information, only when it is externalized through collaboration can we find the uses of that knowledge and continue to build upon it.