Roots and Networks

Learners are like plants. Each one is unique, but they all need a few basics like, soil, light, and water in order to grow. To understand how they truly thrive, however, one has to consider the environment—the entire ecosystem, really: climate, shade, protection from wind or heavy rains, proximity to other plants (both beneficial and harmful), other creatures in the soil such as worms and insects, etc. A plant’s connections to its environment enable its growth, much like a learner’s interactions with other learners enable his or her learning.

While this is not a perfect analogy, I do think the vastness of the systems that interact to affect a plant’s life make for a fair parallel to the systems of knowledge we have available to us—not to mention the information that will be available (and different!) tomorrow or five years from now. A plant sends down roots to gather water and forms leaves to gather sunlight to sustain itself and grow. We, as learners, send our quests for knowledge and information out into the universe and then create meaning with and make decisions based on what we find and how we found it. In his article "Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age," Siemens writes,  “The capacity to form connections between sources of information, and thereby create useful information patterns, is required to learn in our knowledge economy.” A critical part of learning is figuring out how to make sense of the information available to us—deciding what is useful or credible, sorting facts from opinions. 

In his video "The network is the learning," Siemens argues that “What we know today is not as important as our ability to continue to stay current.” The implication there is that knowing how to gather and sort through information in order to solve problems and make decisions is a critical skill in an age when the knowledge available changes by the second. Knowing the "right" answer is less important than knowing where to find it or how to convey it. If a plant didn't use it's knowledge to produce flowers or seeds, it would die out. Similarly, learners in the digital age need not just knowledge, but ways to find and stay connected to knowledge as it grows and changes or they risk getting left behind as the networked world grows around them.