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’.

Reactions to Videos about Future Education

Social Media Revolution

What is the power of social media? People share their experiences through social networks. We chat with friends online. We cannot access facebook and youtube in China but Renren and Youku are created to replace them. A new product needs social media to let people know it.

I am shocked by one scene that says ‘If Wikipedia were made into a book, it would be 2.25 million pages long’.  It is impossible to make Wikipedia into a book but it can exist in our learning in another more convenient style. We can search almost everything from Wikipedia. People prefer to read online than take a heavy book now. We can see people in the public with an ipad in their hands. Even some kids are crazy about computer games. I remembered that a school in China also uses ipad instead of blackboard.

The Networked Students

How do 21th century students learn? They may not have a textbook. I believe that this is true in the future. For example, we do not have a textbook for this online course. A textbook is written by one or maybe two or three writers, so we can only access opinions by the writers. That is not enough. Students can search for more information that they need online. How?

Students can search the internet for specific topic and save useful ones in their computer. At last students create their own knowledgebase on that topic. Students will post their opinions on their blog. Anyone in the world again can access that blog and comment. If I do this, it means I learn from others and others learn from me. I know some of my undergraduate classmates learn online courses from professors all around the world. We may not have the opportunity to go to Stanford. But we can listen to some Stanford courses. We may choose a major and show interest in other field. With those online open courses, we can master a second major.