Attempting to Flourish in the Digital Era

By Jamie Stark. It’s no secret that good learner-centered teaching is meaningful and interesting, requires active participation from learners, uses different methods to incorporate all students’ preferred learning styles and is differentiated at an appropriate level. Vygotsky (1978) stated that learning is achieved by the active construction of knowledge supported by various perspectives within meaningful contexts; making meaning. His constructivist theory is that students learn through social interactions and their culture; that we socially interact and communicate with others to learn the cultural values of our society. This theory is often associated with connectivism. Stephen Downes points out that connectivism (and other theories like constructivism) shares a core proposition, that knowledge is not acquired, as though it were a thing. It’s knowledge that is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks.
But let’s rewind here. Connectivism, whether you believe it’s a new theory on learning or merely a pedagogical view, was only introduced in the early 2000’s. Ryan Tracey, author of the E-Learning Provocateur website, does a great job of detailing the changes in pedagogical theories and how we have moved into the digital age. More...