inner-action: Social Bookmarking 2: Connectivism

May 17, 2005

Social Bookmarking 2: Connectivism

The last information point about social bookmarking from the ELI is #7 from ELI's web page:

What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Tagging information resources with keywords has the potential to change how we store and find information. It may become less important to know and remember where information was found and more important to know how to retrieve it using a framework created by and shared with peers and colleagues. Social bookmarking simplifies the distribution of reference lists, bibliographies,

papers, and other resources among peers or students.

This explanation reminded me of the work George Siemens is doing at elearnspace on Connectivism, posted on the Friday Report in January of 2005.

Here is a brief definition from his article in the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning:

Connectivism

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical.

Clearly, George has put a name to the phenomenon we all face in the digital age: what is information when it is not stored in our own minds?

You can read more of his thoughts at his blog on Connectivism:

http://www.connectivism.ca/blog

May 17, 2005 in connectivism | Permalink