A Learner is Like a Spider

A learner in 2010s is expected to externalize knowledge as a spider busy with weaving a web. If you don’t want to be left behind the trends of learning, you should never stop weaving your knowledge web to connect to more parts of the outside world.

“Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today” stated by George Siemens (2005) lets me think about how to be a life-long learner. Different from behaviorism, cognitivist, and constructivism, his connectivism theory is emphasizing externalizing learning. Decades ago, learners acquired knowledge from teachers or books, while nowadays everyone can be others’ teachers and vast quantities of information can be presented in various types of technology methods. When computer just appeared, it was more challenging to use a computer for searching information than not to use that. Today, information is being updated every second, so a good learner should be like a spider weaving a web to reach out the most updated information and to enrich their knowledge.

We currently have various methods of externalizing our thoughts and ideas with the sharp development of social media. As George Siemen stated in the video The Impact of Social Media on Learning, “Social media enables us to continue to learn from each other, connect to each other, ability to have a dialogue with other individuals, to express ourselves, externalize our knowledge” Social media, such as Blog, social book markers or flicker makes the web we are weaving become bigger and bigger. We build our knowledge through the engagement of communicating with others and the interaction with the world.

A learner in 21st century is like a spider. The web is like the network of knowledge, and every joint in the web can be a connection to a person, or a database or a source of technology. Depth and diversity of connections determines our learning understanding. “The connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing” as Siemens (2005) said in his article.