Learners today

With the changing happened in humans’ lives, many common things nowadays cannot even been imagined in human kinds’ brains many decades ago. The way people learn knowledge shouldn't be an exception. Learners as little as forty years ago would complete the required schooling and enter a career that would often last a lifetime. Information development was slow. The life of knowledge was measured in decades (Connectivism:
A Learning Theory for the Digital Age). However, in recent decades perhaps no one can guarantee that he/she would never change a job which belongs to another brand new field. The pattern of education many decades ago was more like cultivating plants. The moment people entered school was like a seed being planted in its own place. Teachers were like gardeners that through watering and fertilizing each little plants with knowledge, someday they would grow up to what they were already decided to be. Nowadays, this kind of education mode should be altered undoubtedly because the changing of knowledge is so fast that maybe after students graduated from college they would find out what they learned were already obsolete. Just as the article of The Role of Blended Learning in the World of Technology describes: One of the most persuasive factors is the shrinking half-life of knowledge. The “half-life of knowledge” is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete. Half of what is known today was not known 10 years ago. The amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the past 10 years and is doubling every 18 months according to the American Society of Training and Documentation (ASTD). To combat the shrinking half-life of knowledge, organizations have been forced to develop new methods of deploying instruction.

With the coming of digital era, today’s learners are more like individual digital player with its own USB wire. We can learn what we choose efficiently and accurately by simply connecting ourselves with the terminal which stores all kinds of knowledge online and copying or replacing the old knowledge that we already have. Once the process finished, we would own updated knowledge which could make us adapt to the ever changing world much better. But one skill must be mastered before we connected ourselves with the knowledge terminal, which is: the need to evaluate the worthiness of learning something is a meta-skill that is applied before learning itself begins (Connectivism:
A Learning Theory for the Digital Age). Moreover, learners can not only download useful knowledge from the databases, but also share what they thought was helpful to themselves with other learners by uploading their thoughts and knowledge to the terminal. This point has also been described in Siemens’s journal: The starting point of connectivism is the individual. Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual.

Further more, through the video What is Connectivism, I learned more about connectivism. The explanation of connectivism is that we build on the foundation of how we engage with others and how we interact with the world. Knowledge in its many forms of representations was networked and distributed in nature. The experience of learning is one of forming new neural, conceptual and external networks. Also it occurs in complex, chaotic and shifting spaces, which could be increasingly aided by technology. In other words connectivism defines the process of learning just like how neurons in our brain handle all the information by connecting with each other. Such connections create meaning. One thing we should pay more attention to is this connected learning process could not be apart with the assistance of modern tools, which could not only optimize this process but also save us lots of time.