In my INTE4665 class, we recently read an article by Kop and Hill (2008) which discussed the concept of connectivism as a possible new learning theory.

Connectivism seems promising as an emerging learning theory. When I read the article, I immediately thought of Wikipedia as one of the information networks that Kop and Hill mentioned, but then I also began to think of the thousands of message boards on the internet that hold a vast amount of information that people have contributed over time as another form of an information network. Over time, people learn from those sources and then contribute their own knowledge on these networks.

In my opinion, I feel like connectivism is at least a developmental theory, but I believe it is too early to treat it as a separate learning theory, which is the opinion the authors also shared. They believe there may be a paradigm shift occurring in educational theory. It seems this is likely the case, and I am basing this off of a personal opinion of my own. A member of my family is an elementary teacher who works for a public school district that has an online program. Technology and learning pedagogies apparently are changing so quickly that the school administration is continuously asking the teachers to change into different ways of teaching throughout the school year. I feel that with how fast technology in learning is evolving that new learning theories will be developed very soon. However, things are evolving so quickly in the digital age that it’s possible that it will take some time for things to settle down before these emerging developmental theories will qualify as verifiable theories.