Learning Network from Printing Press to Digital World

Education did not change much before massive network of social media available to at least half of the world we live in. The ways of learning have been conceived as individual and internal. Traditionally, classrooms, serving as a center to share knowledge, were the primary learning resource for the students, and thus were believe to be where learning was occurring. Teachers were a mediator for the connection between knowledge and the learners, and learners were, in most of the cases, the end of the connection with teachers on the other end. Outside the classroom, learners were able to be connected to other forms of knowledge in some way through printing press, such as books, articles, newspaper, etc., but the connection and scope of network were so limited that their impact on learners’ learning outside the classroom and outside the individuals could not change the ways of learning and the sites of learning.  In a word, learners in the past were connected to the knowledge in the classrooms, by teachers and textbooks, but rather isolated to the outside world and outside resource.

On the contrary, learners in today’s digital world can be connected to the knowledge anywhere, with or without a teacher, through the network and in the network, even when they are isolated in their own rooms! Today’s learner is like a node in a massive and multidirectional network. Formal education, which was acquired primarily in a classroom, is no longer the majority of our learning resources because learning now is occurring in a numerous ways and at any places one can think of.  

As George Siemens pointed out in A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, “Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge.” Thus the network learners are involved in and the network they build in their learning become the sites of learning.  In this sense, knowledge itself has also changed in nature. In his short video clip, The Changing Nature of Knowledge, Siemens, from a Connectivism perspective, took knowledge as “the distribution that occurs across the entire  network”.

In another video, What is Connectivism, he presented in more details both the internal and external components of network learning: learning network is internal, neural and conceptual in nature, but learning network can be “external and social, which is a function of how we are related to and connected to other individuals and sources of information”. 

Taking this stance, as I mentioned earlier, a learner is like trader in a the global market.Every learner connected to the network learning is first a consumer of information and resources. The learning network is like a global market, where the consumer can find anything they need and they are interested once they are linked to it. Since every consumer would probably need more than just one product, so they are connected to different traders through the network in differer locations.

The connection could also be expanded in one way or another. For example, one customer wants to find a dress for a birthday party. Once she gets connected to different sellers of dresses and decides on which one to buy, she will probably need to by a necklace to match the dress.  The seller of the dress may link the customer to a few different accessory stores by sharing information or putting the accessory stores next to the dresses they sell. Also, every consumer in this trade network is also a producer, seller, and contributor. They are free to offer their products to other consumers in the network, and connect other customers to other different sellers and stores, which eventually would be part of the expansion of the global market network. 

In one word, in this progression of networks, learners are not the end of the connections with knowledge as in traditional classroom, but can be the starting point of the connection with the knowledge. To be more specific, in the digital world, learners are in multi-directional connections with others and the learning networks.  They are not only the information receivers, but also information contributors, and the multi-directional connections every learner has with other individual and ultimately the digital world make every individual a life-long learner.