Fitting the Pieces Together

In the first week of EDUC 6115 Learning Theories and Instruction, I wrote that I learned best when the instructor is (a) passionate and energetic in his/her delivery of content and (b) relies on more than multiple-choice and true-false exams to assess student learning.  I also wrote that I appreciated that, in the cognitive learning domain, an objective truth is "out there."  I don't believe this to be true for all things, but perhaps for most practical things we learn in life.  If that's the case, and if an instructor understands my current state of thinking and learning, then he/she is more likely to create an effective teaching strategy to help me reach the desired outcome. On top of my appreciation for the cognitive approach, I also like that within the constructivist approach, there is an emphasis on learning (as opposed to just teaching). In the end, I think the combination of cognitive-style teaching with constructivist-style learning would ultimately lead to my best possible learning environment.  Again, everything to this point in this post is a summary of my feelings from the first week in EDUC 6115. 

Six weeks later, the aforementioned feelings I described have not changed.  However, I do see additional layers of other theories that have altered how I view how I learn.  Specifically, and most significantly, I have become a major proponent of George Siemens' theory of connectivism.  Central to the theory of connectivism is the idea of the half-life of knowledge, which has been defined as "the time span from when knowledge is gained until it becomes obsolete."  In a world where the half-life of knowledge continues to decrease, we increasingly need access to networks that provide us with rapidly evolving information we seek and/or need.  As someone who can't imagine being away from the Internet and a Blackberry for more than a few consecutive waking hours, I'm very drawn to this idea, not only because I believe it to be true, but also because it's something that I live on a regular basis... I just never thought about it the way George Siemens has presented it.  In my introductory stages of understanding this theory, I especially appreciated the video titled Networked Student as it effectively showed a fictional example of how the theory can be applied.  

Given how I felt at the beginning of this course and how I feel as we near the end of the course, my ideal instructor would have the following three viewpoints.  He/she would (1) view teaching from a cognitive perspective, (2) view learning from a constructivist perspective, and (3) facilitate network-building and web 2.0 technology from a connectivist perspective.  As much as I enjoy all (or, at least most) educational technologies, I personally get the most out of easily accessible web 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis and networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.  Not only are these tools easy to access, easy to use, and often free, they also give us access to subject matter experts and others that otherwise would be very difficult to communicate and interact with.  For me, integrating these types of technologies make for a very exciting learning environment.  And, perhaps most importantly, it's an environment that can be sustained beyond the start and end dates of any given course.