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Salvete omnes! For today’s post I want to discuss the concept of connectivism, but first, have you ever heard of Moore’s Law? For those readers who have not, simply put, Moore’s Law states that processor speeds, or overall processing power of computers will double every two years. This statement was coined in 1965 by George Moore who is one of the co-founders of Intel and is still a popular trend that can be observed among technology today. 

If at this point you are thinking, “well that is a neat fun fact, but what does that have to do with education?”. I’m so glad you asked because to me, a learner is like technology. We’ve all heard this saying before but I’m going to say it again now, what students are learning today, and how they are learning it, has drastically changed from when I was in school. So too has technology.

Just as we have discussed before on this blog, changes in policy, the incorporation of technology in our classrooms, and the amount of information available is changing how students are learning and remembering the information they are being taught.

of Knowledge

I found myself thinking about this topic once again after reading Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age by George Siemens. In his article, Siemens discusses the diminishing half-life of knowledge, quoting that, “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” (Siemens).

Now eighteen months may seem like a short amount of time, especially considering the time span of Moore’s Law mentioned before, but the students we are seeing in our classroom today grew up with the internet and all the technology we have developed since then at their fingertips. I cannot tell you how many other education technology blogs I have read where the author is able to share a story about how their students knew more about the classroom technology than they did. And personally I find it amazing how tech savvy and eager to learn our students are today.

In a video titled, The Network is the Learning, George Simmons explains, “[...] the way we are connected to other individuals is largely responsible for our ability to continue to stay current in the field.” Students are like technology in the sense that their learning is no longer individualistic, but has become a collaborative and interconnected activity. Much like how technology used to be self-contained, like old-fashion pedometers, everything that it needed to know was already contained within the device. Nowadays devices, such as your fitbit, your cellphone, your laptop, and even the wireless mouse some of you might be using to scroll through this post, talk to each other and, more often than not, the information they need is going to be provided from somewhere else by a different source of technology.