Science technology has been the greatest dynamic force to move us from the primitive state to the modern society. With all the revolutions of modern science-technology occurred since 19 century, changes in all areas of human being’s life has been taking place enormously. Miracles come to the reality and dreams come true. We cannot imagine what our life would be without the modern transportation and communication tools. Human being's life is being changed permanently.
With all these tremendous changes contributed by science-technology, one thing is the core value--Knowledge is the strength and power. Here 'knowledge' can be transformed into productivity, mainly means 'Nature Science'; As for the concept of knowledge as whole, it also includes the knowledge of social science. There are various of knowledges regarding its depth and width. We need to obtain certain knowledge that helps us lay a soild base on which we can move further to and dig deeper of the unknown, then the new ideas and thoughts are created, constructed from there.
What is the defination of knowledge?
" Knowledge is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as (i) expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, (ii) what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or (iii) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation. Philosophical debates in general start with Plato's formulation of knowledge as "justified true belief". There is however no single agreed definition of knowledge presently, nor any prospect of one, and there remain numerous competing theories.
Knowledge acquisition involves complex cognitive processes: perception, learning, communication, association and reasoning. The term knowledge is also used to mean the confident understanding of a subject with the ability to use it for a specific purpose if appropriate. See Knowledge Management for additional details on that discipline."
From my understanding, one kind of knowledge must apply to a particular system or environment. For example, the theory of gravity works on Earth, but not on Moon; The four season's weather exists in temperature zoo, but not in tropical zoo; Most of time we are only interested in the knowledge within our system. It is unnecessary to know what exists outside of our system. Perhaps we can call knowledge at this level 'L1 ' knowledge;
However, we must also understand why gravity does not function on Moon, and why there is only one summer season in Bangkok, and four seasons in Beijing. Those general principles work universally. We can use these common principles to explain the differences and changes. One day Clobal warming might change Bangkok to a city with four seasons, and we must understand how this happens, therefore we can predict the trends of ongoing events. The general principles is at level of 'L2 ' knowledge. So there are different layers of knowledge.
Also there are so much new ideas and new phenomenons being created at rapid speed.
"...the shrinking half -life of knowledge...the half-life of knowledge is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete."-George Siemens. Are these so called half-life of knowledge worth learning or exploring? Personally speaking, I would rather not see 'half-life of knowledge" as a kind of knowledge, I would rather see this as a process of forming a kind of knowledge, then later on relatively solid principle comes along. It would be more professional to teach our students those L2 knowledge before leading them to the Chaos.
3. Connectivism
“nodes always compete for connections because links represent survival in an interconnected world” (2002, p.106). ..Nodes that successfully acquire greater profile will be more successful at acquiring additional connections. In a learning sense, the likelihood that a concept of learning will be linked depends on how well it is currently linked. Nodes (can be fields, ideas, communities) that specialize and gain recognition for their expertise have greater chances of recognition, thus resulting in cross-pollination of learning communities"
" The starting point of connectivism is the individual. 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. "
- Learning
21st century is E-time. It is digital age. We are now facing the challenge that we need to re-consider the traditional learning pattern: Behaviorism---cognitivism---constructivism.
This change will be totally different from those changes happened before. This change is going to reform human being's learning manners.
Some significient trends in learning:
--George Siemens http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm--
" Technology is altering our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking."
"Many of the processes previously handled by learning theories (especially in cognitive information processing) can now be off-loaded to, or supported by technology."
Is technology rendering certain innate capabilities within us? of course, it is. Apparently there is no need to maintain the abilities that technology can perform on behalf of us, such as typing words in computer instead of handwriting, relying on the database stored in computer instead of memorizing them in our own brain...you can list on and on...
- What is left behind after we hand over almost all our internality to technology?
- What is actually left for us to learn?
- Are we heading for half robot-half human type of community?
Pointing out the limitations of traditional learning theories 1) 'is that learning occurs inside a person...do not address learning that occurs outside of people; ...2) are concerned with the actual process of learning, not with the value of what is being learned...
- What are the essential differences between individual and social learning?
- How does individual experiences differ from one to another?
- What are the criterias for evaluating the worthiness of certain learning?
2. Knowledge
With all these tremendous changes contributed by science-technology, one thing is the core value--Knowledge is the strength and power. Here 'knowledge' can be transformed into productivity, mainly means 'Nature Science'; As for the concept of knowledge as whole, it also includes the knowledge of social science. There are various of knowledges regarding its depth and width. We need to obtain certain knowledge that helps us lay a soild base on which we can move further to and dig deeper of the unknown, then the new ideas and thoughts are created, constructed from there.
What is the defination of knowledge?
" Knowledge is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as (i) expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, (ii) what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or (iii) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation. Philosophical debates in general start with Plato's formulation of knowledge as "justified true belief". There is however no single agreed definition of knowledge presently, nor any prospect of one, and there remain numerous competing theories.
Knowledge acquisition involves complex cognitive processes: perception, learning, communication, association and reasoning. The term knowledge is also used to mean the confident understanding of a subject with the ability to use it for a specific purpose if appropriate. See Knowledge Management for additional details on that discipline."
From my understanding, one kind of knowledge must apply to a particular system or environment. For example, the theory of gravity works on Earth, but not on Moon; The four season's weather exists in temperature zoo, but not in tropical zoo; Most of time we are only interested in the knowledge within our system. It is unnecessary to know what exists outside of our system. Perhaps we can call knowledge at this level 'L1 ' knowledge;
However, we must also understand why gravity does not function on Moon, and why there is only one summer season in Bangkok, and four seasons in Beijing. Those general principles work universally. We can use these common principles to explain the differences and changes. One day Clobal warming might change Bangkok to a city with four seasons, and we must understand how this happens, therefore we can predict the trends of ongoing events. The general principles is at level of 'L2 ' knowledge. So there are different layers of knowledge.
Also there are so much new ideas and new phenomenons being created at rapid speed.
"...the shrinking half -life of knowledge...the half-life of knowledge is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete."-George Siemens. Are these so called half-life of knowledge worth learning or exploring? Personally speaking, I would rather not see 'half-life of knowledge" as a kind of knowledge, I would rather see this as a process of forming a kind of knowledge, then later on relatively solid principle comes along. It would be more professional to teach our students those L2 knowledge before leading them to the Chaos.
3. Connectivism
“nodes always compete for connections because links represent survival in an interconnected world” (2002, p.106). ..Nodes that successfully acquire greater profile will be more successful at acquiring additional connections. In a learning sense, the likelihood that a concept of learning will be linked depends on how well it is currently linked. Nodes (can be fields, ideas, communities) that specialize and gain recognition for their expertise have greater chances of recognition, thus resulting in cross-pollination of learning communities"
" The starting point of connectivism is the individual. 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. "
- Having amount of solid knowledge base makes connectivism significient.
- Individual quality in possessing valuable knowledge determinds the quality of the connection formed by the individuals.
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