Looking Through My Own Filters…
Starting the Course on Connectivism
I signed up on an online course on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. This is the first week of the course, but people are already actively tackling with the definition of connectivism. For myself, I just don’t want to come across so critical, yet as a student of social sciences for many years, I want to be careful about any kind of “theories”: what they promise to be vs. what they are. Many theories can be useful in a limited manner, and as long as you apply them in that manner, they can be enlightening and useful. But if you elevate any theory to a value system or something more than it is, then I know that we are in trouble:
“Those who know will not say; those who say do not know.”
I stick to the Taoist widsdom to place all the things called theories into perspective and I try.
I just began reading Stephen Downes’ “What Connectivism Is.” According to him:
“… it is not more than the process of making connections. That’s why learning is at once so simple it seems it should be easily explained and so complex that it seems to defy explanation (cf. Hume on this). How can learning – something so basic that infants and animals can do it – defy explanation? As soon as you make learning an intentional process (that is, a process that involves the deliberate creation of a representation) you have made these simple cases difficult, if not impossible, to understand.”
This paragraph resonates with what I heard on the radio this week about the philosophical baby (toward the end of the page). It’s about a book called The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life .
So when we are babies, we have an amazing capacity to learn. It’s good to confirm that. But what about all the environmental, social and cultural factors that shape how we filter our learning as we grow older? For example, different cultural orientations influence how we view our world and our own value orientations.
I will continue reading more about connectivism and want to clarify what it is trying to achieve and why connectivism.
