Connectivism: George Siemens

Because I was in Canada last week and, due to a comedy of errors (not actually very funny at the time), didn't have access to a computer, I'm writing this with the benefit of having read some of the other posts.

I shared some of the frustration others felt with the article in general (not much of a theory, contained many truisms, etc.), so I won't cover the same ground. Instead I'll focus on a single line, not about connectivism per se, but from the list that Siemens gives of significant trends in learning (not that he offered any evidence to back up his claim that these were trends): Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking.

Earlier this year, in an article entitled Is Google Making Us Stupid? published in the Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google), Nicholas Carr wrote: "Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory...I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy...Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do...The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle...what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles."

This rings true for me. I see it in my own blog entries. The temptation is to blast out a few superficial thoughts and move on. I'm worried about boring my audience. There's too much information and too little time. And our instructional methodologies mimic this fragmentation: blogs, wikis, podcasts. I recently received in my email inbox an article on designing elearning for PDAs.

Carr ends his article as follows:

"Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking."

If Siemens is correct and technology is altering (rewiring) our brains and the tools we use define and shape our thinking, then we'd be well advised to think not just about how to use the tools we are given, but how to wisely choose the tools we use.