Changed Approaches to Learning and Managing: Connectivity

I found the readings for Week #2 to be realistic and useful. "Messing Around" is, from my experience as a parent AND educator, how most students currently use technology and tools: primarily for social purposes, in self-defined ways, without pre-defined goals. So we have a long way to go - as learners ourselves, and then as mentors, if we are going to get the education piece right. I did find that this excerpt helped me to understand male learners better - how and why gaming appeals to them, and that generally this is their social construct. We watched our daughter grow up with the explosion of MySpace and Facebook, but our son had left home and ISB prior to the exponential growth of the digital world. As I observe and reflect more closely, I realize that I have been focussing on and understanding my female learners (in the digital world)better because of my parental experience.

Bloom's revised taxonomy was very practical - immediately for me as a student in this course (I'm a list kind of person), and eventually as I design tasks or assessments for my own students/classes. It makes sense, and it isn't tied to an economic theory or capitalist venture (see previous blogs :)

CONNECTIVISM: I'm still pondering some of the concepts in this article, but here are the ideas I found most salient, new, or provocative (with comments in parentheses):

Knowledge is growing exponentially (in every field?)

Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains. (How do we know this? In positive or negative ways?)

Learning is a lasting changed state brought about as a result of experiences and inteactions with content or people (this definition of learning HASN'T changed)

Classrooms which emulae the "fuzziness" of learning will be more effective in preparing learners for life-long learning. (Global issues, one content subject I teach, are messay and complex - nice overlap here!)

When knowledge is abundant, the rapid evaluation of knowledge is important. (To me, this is one of our biggest jobs as educators - perhaps MORE important than teaching kids how to navigate the web and operate all the tools)

The health of the learning ecology of an organization depends on effective nurturing of information flow. Diverse team of varying viewpoints are a critical structure for completely exploring ideas. (Is ISB's management structure keeping up with the changes that connectivity requires?)