Connectivism revisited

I have really enjoyed reading and listening to George Siemens on connectivism. I always say to people that I'm so glad I don't live in a vacuum (often in response to hearing a great idea), and I think that really sums up the concepts highlighted by connectivism.

He stressed that knowledge is a moving target now--adaptive and emergent. Different skills are required to deal with knowledge as a moving target rather than a stationary target; we need to manage knowledge as a process rather than a product. This leads to one of his main points: "We have defined our students with skill sets that enable them to be relevant in a world that existed about 20 years ago."

With knowledge being so fluid, he urged that our capacity to know more must be nurtured because it is far more important than putting our intellect in stasis by clinging to what we know today without the skills to continually build on it. To this end, he noted that content is the conduit for conversation and we must find ways to utilize this conduit in developing the capacity to know more.

Although I only heard 10, he said that there were 11 key elements comprising the nature of learning today with which the educational system is at odds. I'll list 9 of them here because the 10th was an ad for his blog:

1. Anchoring (reduce mutiple stimuli and distractions, be disciplined in thought)
2. Filtering (peer review)
3. Connecting (connect to the right sources & info to keep us current; being personable and human with technology as well as with face-to-face interactions)
4. Creating & deriving meaning (what does it mean to me and to what I'm doing?)
5. Authenticating and validating information (how do we know it's true?)
6. Critical and creative thinking skills (both in balance)
7. Pattern recognition (how to move through it all to what is needed)
8. Accepting uncertainty (are we prepared to accept a fuzzy truth instead of a simplistic falsehood?)
9. Contextualizing (some people just promoting one's own perspective instead of listening to another's perspective; where was the person coming from when they generated their bit of information?)

He didn't say it in the list, but he earlier noted that we should seek diversity in our information. Not just the extremes, which he said comprise around 20% of the population and define the boundaries of a given subject's range, but the rest of the 80% who span the entire spectrum. Seeking diversity, rather than sticking to our echo chamber, helps us be informed individuals.

These all point to something else he said and which we discussed at length in the last class session: "The reverse of knowledge happens when we have too many choices... We know how to break knowledge apart... what we need now is to know how to bind it together... so that it's meaningful for us."

I think that what he's really saying is that people need to learn how to develop an intuition for finding relevant and contextual information in general, not just their knowledge domains. As knowledge is decentralized, we must be discriminating in what we choose to consume without confining ourselves to our own specific niche or opinion.