This news about MITx new course is surely one of the most attractive headline of the day. I would be interested to learn if pedagogy would make a difference in the number of participants in such a “MOOC” – especially in attracting a massive number of students around the globe, after the Stanford AI course.
I have postulated here in my previous post that most of the interested learners would be at a younger age, rather than those old aged learners. There are also pre-requisite knowledge for the course with MITx. The course is free of charge.
What is common about Connectivism, Constructivism and Constructionism?
Connectivism: One aspect of connectivism is the use of a network with nodes and connections as a central metaphor for learning. In this metaphor, a node is anything that can be connected to another node within a network such as an organisation: information, data, feelings, images. Connectivism sees learning as the process of creating connections and developing a network.
Constructivism: through processes of accommodation and assimilation, individuals construct new knowledge from their experiences.
Constructionism: learning can happen most effectively when people are also active in making tangible objects in the real world. Learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product.
Source: wikipedia
I reckon there are three common aspects that characterized the three learning theories, though they may be perceived quite differently with individual lenses:
1. Construction:
Connectivism – focus on networks, among entities.
Constructivism – focus on knowledge from experiences & interaction, individually, and socially.
Constructionism – focus on the construction of meaningful product, knowledge in one’s mind.
2. Creativity and creation – of ideas, artifacts, learning objects, or projects:
Connectivism – creation of an environment, with individuals creating artifacts, through curation of ideas, posts, mixing, repurposing, re-designing and developing, and posting of artifacts, with sensemaking, where people make sense of the experience in the world, and wayfinding. In a MOOC environment, the CDE – chaotic, distributed, and emergent learning. See this research by Kop, Fournier and Mak (2011), for details.
Constructivism – creation of conversation, and interaction.
Constructionism – creation of meaningful objects or products.
3. Ideas, concepts, experimentation
All theories would be explored through the curation and examination of ideas, development of concepts, connection of concepts in ones mind (the cognition) and with other people, individual reflection of ideas and concepts based on metacognition (thinking how to think), experimentation of networks and communities, through research, discourse, and critical inquiry.
So, theories provide their own lens into the world, with each theory providing a different lens (or perspective) (Kuhn, 1970). I found it interesting to explore with the different MOOCs.
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