Use your "silk" to connect the world!

A teacher is like a spider today.

I know my analogy would seem to be a little weird, because no one wants to be an insect really. However, after have read the article and seen some of the videos, my first impression of teachers’ image nowadays is spiders. Please read my post, and then you will understand why I had this thought.

There are two things that impressed me in the article Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. (Siemens, G. 2005, January). There are two principles he mentioned in Principles of Connectivism. The first one is “Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.” And the second one is “Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.”  

Since the technology is developing really fast these days, we have to change our original way of teaching. In the past, one just needed to master the knowledge in his own field. For example, a lawyer only needed to know all the legal items and the cases in the past, but he needs to know much more knowledge nowadays. Because the cases varies, and there are so many different cases that involves information of different field. If a lawyer wants to engage a lawsuit for a farmer, he may need to get some basic understanding of agriculture, eg: the procedures of planting, the fertilizer they use, and the product they sell, etc. Or he may easily lose the suit because he’s lack of some concepts of the agricultural field, and he cannot grab any emphasis about the case. As a result, the trend of the learning procedures of the times is the students need to connect different subjects together, because all these subjects are related to each other, and they form our life together. If a student only likes to learn physics, but he’s a terrible English learner, he may encounter much more difficulties than he imagines if he goes abroad for further study. Those difficulties may not be academic, but they could still be very tough. Therefore, teachers need to change our role from a person who teaches one single subject to an educator who could help the students to make the connections from his own subject to others. So being a teacher, we need to obtain more knowledge than we did before, or we cannot satisfy the students’ request. Therefore, I consider a teacher as a spider, because a spider has the ability to produce the silk and make the silk to a net. Using the net, we can reach every spot we need and get what we want to get. Moreover, the spider can control the direction of the silk splitting, so it just seems like a teacher can connect to any field of knowledge related to the subject she is teaching.

Being like a “spider” is not a very simple thing. Although I said a teacher in these days needs to obtain more knowledge than before, it is always easier to say than to do. Thanks God we have technology and we have computer. In the video The Changing Nature of Knowledge, the man mentioned the old-style computer we used to use. It was the computers with black screen, and the exact words the man said were “To use it was more of a challenge than to not to use it.” One common person cannot know information of all the fields, so the way we make connection is to form a combination of database and other resources. We cannot stall everything in our brains, but we can save them in the computer, and take them out when it’s necessary. The important thing is we need to let the students realize how important the connection is, and what the benefits are to make the connections during their learning process.

“Knowledge is really about the distribution occurs across the entire network.” We need to know that everything on the world is not isolated. Everything has its own connection with others. Using this magic power, we could become a better “spider”, and at the same time, we would save a lot of time “splitting|”.