Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ CCK08 Week Three: Eight Important Questions About Learning and Connection

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
Forget the other seven questions. The key question posed against Connectivism is (as it was against associationism and connectionism in earlier years) this: " If learning is, as the instructors of this course contend, nothing more or less than 'making connections' (neural, conceptual, and social), how do we learn to learn the things in the chart above and the other things we need to learn to be self-sufficient, useful members of communities -- to be who we were intended to be?"

There's no short answer to the question. Part of it requires an account of how successive and repeated experiences produce patterns of connectivity, and how these patterns are what we experience when we say that we 'know'. And another part of it requires an account of how we are misled by language, about how we don't actually 'know' much of what we claim to know, including knowledge of universals, spiritual entities such as 'Gaia', and a host of other linguistic phenomena.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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