Connectivism, "a learning theory for the digital age," has been developed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes based on their analysis of the limitations of behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism to explain the effect technology has had on how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn.

Sebastian Seung is mapping a massively ambitious new model of the brain that focuses on the connections between each neuron. He calls it our "connectome," and it's as individual as our genome -- and understanding it could open a new way to understand our brains and our minds.

Maintaining that learning theories should be reflective of underlying social environments, Siemens (2004) describes the limitations of behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism (and the epistemological traditions which underpin them - objectivism, pragmatism and interpetivism - and their representations of what is reality and knowledge) to introduce connectivism as 'a learning theory for the digital age.'

At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks.

a critical question: what is the unique idea in connectivism?