A learner is like a hunter

A learner is like a hunter. A hunter needs to hunt in the wild and concentrate on what he is doing. To hunt successfully, a hunter has to cooperate with other hunters. A language learner, similarly, has to learn by themselves and interact with others.

Our learning process is a socially interacted network. As Siemens posits in his article A learning Theory for the Digital Age, ‘Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual’. We cannot separate the learners from the organizations and institutions.

The hunter will have to update their hunting method as times goes on.  In the video The Network is the Learning, he says that ‘If I am not continuing learning, I am becoming obsolete in my particular field’, which also emphasizes that we have to keep learning because knowledge is always changing. 

In order to cooperate with other hunters, the hunter has to use some advanced communication tools. In learning process, one important way of learning is the impact of social software. Siemens elaborates an example of ‘online photo sharing’ in the video The Impact of Social Media on Learning. You can go and comment on someone else’s images and make connection with others that have the same tags, the same interest with you. This makes the process that sharing those resources into a dialogue, a conversation. Siemens says that ‘Most of us enjoy conversation, we are social beings’. He explains that our knowledge grows by doing this because ‘words really give life to thought’.