Connectivism

You are smarter than you used to be, and you are not.

If you compared the raw amount of information sitting inside your own head to what was there fifteen years ago, it is probably not very different. What has changed completely is how fast you can reach the things you do not know. You have a question, you pick up a device, and within seconds you are reading an answer written by someone with far more expertise than you will ever have on that specific topic. This has not made you dumber, despite what the old fashioned argument claims. It has made you a different kind of knower. You are no longer mainly the thing inside your skull. You are a node in a network, and your ability to find, evaluate, and traverse the other nodes has become at least as important as the facts you happen to have memorised. The network is doing a real part of the thinking.

A theorist named George Siemens argued that this is a fundamental shift, not a convenience. Knowledge does not live only inside individual people anymore. It lives in the connections between people, between books, between databases, between the half remembered thing your aunt told you and the search you are about to run. What matters is your ability to navigate that web, judge what is worth trusting, and stitch together an answer from pieces that did not exist in one place. And yet we still mostly test children and university students and job candidates by sitting them in a room alone with no device, as if the network they rely on every day is somehow cheating. When did you last work something important out entirely on your own, with no help from anything or anyone, and would you even want to?

Last week we said you are now part of a network rather than a sealed mind. This week we look at the long, slow climb from following rules to no longer needing them.