Connectivism theory

Connectivism theory predicts that learning occurs as the result of connecting multiple ideas and thoughts from multiple sources. It promotes the use of digital media, technology tools, and situated cognition approaches as fundamental parts of a person's cognition and learning process that should be taken advantage of and used during the learning process.

Definition

Connectivist learning theory suggests that a person creates a network of knowledge from multiple sources and develops skill with navigating those sources. From this perspective, a person encounters new challenges through a process of identifying and evaluating sources of information and developing procedures for navigating through and acting with information to achieve goals.

Learning from this perspective would be students making new connections and learning new skills of how to use these sources of knowledge. This includes the addition of, navigation to, and evaluation of new sources of information, as well as new skills for making decisions about and using information to complete tasks.

Additional Information

Note: the field of conectivist theory is vast and far greater than the scope of this article. This is provided as a basic primer to the field and the primary concepts that are used in education. It is far from comprehensive and it is recommended that you do deeper research if you are interested in this branch of psychology and educational theory.

The connectivist perspective is relatively new, having been founded on principles of new media, mass communication, and the use of multimedia resources, production tools, and internet connectivity that have spread in the modern educational landscape. Thus, it heavily encourages the use of internet-based resources and digital technologies for performing tasks.

Connectivism emphasizes that a learner needs to continually practice and make connections between skills, or procedures on how to do tasks, and information sources, or recorded knowledge that is available across multiple sources and media. This approach also embraces social learning as a key process involved with learning, where learners need to communicate with, share between, and develop common understandings with other people to understand how and why things work the way they do.

Another trademark quality of connectivism is that most learning activities are performed through projects or publicly visible tasks, such as the use of social media, communications technologies, and media production. By making learning activities visible, social interactions are more readily able to occur to allow dialogue and collaboration to develop a shared understanding about the content being studied.

Common traits of connectivist theories of learning include:

Reliance on media and communications tools in learning activities to make them publicly visible and observable. This gives an opportunity for rich social interaction, dialogue, and development of shared understandings and perspective taking on the content.
Making multiple connections between information sources and technologies to perform authentic tasks and projects.
Authentic use of production tools to make real-world projects that can be critiqued by others.

Tips and Tricks

When working in the modern knowledge economy, it is common to draw from multiple information sources and connect these sources to perform tasks. Connectivist perspectives of learning suggest that this should be embraced and is a part of learning. Consider how learners might use multiple different information sources in your learning product and how these connection-making skills can be practiced through learners working on projects.
Think about how learners may take advantage of publicly visible learning activities to encourage social collaboration and feedback. By making projects and tasks visible, it opens the learning process to include multiple perspectives and a richer understanding of content.

Connectivism theory

From The Learning Engineer's Knowledgebase

Contents

Definition

Additional Information

Tips and Tricks

Related Concepts

Examples

External Resources