Archival copy of a post to Stephen’s Web here:
I see Connectivism as a much more natural thing than most people seem to see. I think every human being practices it every day… in fact, that most sentient beings do, and that the formal classroom model was specifically designed AGAINST it.
We naturally network the way a dog follows a scent. Whether deliberately laid in the dog’s path or stumbled upon on a walk, the scent is the source of all kinds of information about an entity otherwise outside the dog’s range but which the dog associates with some other connection it has made, or will make. After going in this same path several times and comparing these scents the dog “learns” whether the source of those scents is recent, recurrent, etc. and will “learn” to either do all in its power to get to the scents or source of those scents or to avoid both.
Students are like (forgive me) those dogs and their instructors are laying paths of scent. The response of the students to what is there, their ability to follow that path as expected and desired in traditional education, is directly proportional to the quality of the scent laid. But some connection, some learning, will happen even if it’s not the one intended.
When your scent path isn’t interesting enough you must force your students to sit together in a room or threaten that they will only have a livelihood or close target reward if they follow your scent path, however difficult or uninteresting.
But if you leave a scent path (as you do naturally) that is interesting enough (and, one could argue, already associated with other connections in the one following the scent) then you could simply speak on a hillside and have a following forever.
