Deconstructing Connectivism

After listening Siemens' lecture on Connectivism I could barely grasp this new "learning theory" at first. Some aspect of Connectivism sound familiar (neurological part), but I could'n find a clear connection his theory with teaching. Clearly, there was a disconnect between me and the guest speaker. I could hear his voice. What was missing is a picture. It didn't take a lot to reconnect to George Siemens throught his interview at the Rick's Cafe Canadien.

A similar concept (with a similar name "Connective") has been developed in 1999 by Eyal Sivan, Business Analyst & Integration Architect working in Toronto, Canada (Origin of the Connective).

In his blog, Connectivism-as-learning-theory, Sivan compares and contracts these two ideas. Reading this blog, help me deconstruct Connectivism. It features several other topics, Scale-Free Thinking, Fearing Digital Literacy, where Eyal explores several articles about technology and education.

Interestingly, the second post quotes Kevin Kelly, whose idea on "Evolution of Technology" discussed on my first post. Kevin Kelly's Prediction on the Next 5000 days of the web is also mention in the interview with George Simens. So, after this I wasn't really surprised to find Sivan's comments on Kevin Kelly's blog The Technium where Wikipedia phenomenon is discused.

In my opinnion there is no such thing as Educational Theory per se (Why Do We Need A Theory). When it comes to education it is simply a matter of your personal beliefs. In fact, I think Connectivism is simpler that you think. It is about a game with a set of simple rules, the game called emergence.

The emergence phenomenon is so profound that it opens a new look for the discovery of the origins of life itself.

"The World Wide Web (WWW) is a popular example of a decentralized system exhibiting emergent properties. There is no central organization rationing the number of links, yet the number of links pointing to each page follows a power law in which a few pages are linked to many times and most pages are seldom linked to. A related property of the network of links in the World Wide Web is that almost any pair of pages can be connected to each other through a relatively short chain of links. Although relatively well known now, this property was initially unexpected in an unregulated network. It is shared with many other types of networks called small-world networks.(Barabasi, Jeong, & Albert 1999, pp. 130-131)"

But, here is a question: If each of us a part of this complex system, how many connections each of us can hold? Microchip transistor can hold at most ten connections. How many interaction can you handle? Would it be enough for emergence (learning) occur within yourself? Is there a limit to how smart you can get through these connections?

In fact, maybe, just maybe we have been always connected. A new paradigm has emerged from quantum mechanics that may holds a key to understanding our universal connection.