#CCK11 What Makes Connectivism Unique?

This week’s topic is the uniqueness of Connectivism , and its status as a theory was vehemently challenged. For me, it is not very important whether Connectivism is already a theory or not, because it is much more: I guess it is a fertile soil for multiple future theories.

The central metaphor is so powerful (and I am glad that the edit war on wikipedia did not destroy this central passage):

“Not all connections are of equal strength in this metaphor” (Wikipedia)

This enables a whole new view, and in particular, it draws our attention to a type of knowledge that had been overlooked in favor of simple propositional and snap-in knowledge: Knowledge that can not be represented by connections of binary (1 or 0) strength, no matter if they are “complicated” hierarchical connections or complex cross references and interrelationships.

I think there is still a lot of unleveraged potential buried in the connectivist metaphor, in particular, on its layer #2 (conceptual, above #1 neuronal and below #3 social/ external). Currently, discussions often diverge into the more spectacular #3, or into philosophical issues and connectionism and #1.

IMHO, the unique “selling point” of the metaphor is that it applies to all three layers. So I am looking forward to a promising future of connectivism.

11 February 2011 | CCK11 | Comments