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Every five or ten years, when a major new computer chip, visual medium or telecommunications channel comes along, the trumpet is sounded: The revolution is about to happen

But the revolution doesn't happen.  By the time another major new technology appears a few years later the earlier predictions have been forgotten or shrugged off.  If anyone wonders what went wrong, they are told that the old technology was obviously too slow or primitive.  This cycle of failure has been repeated many times: mainframe computers, personal computers, videodiscs, graphical user interfaces, HyperCard, E-mail, CD-ROMs, Gopher, the Web.

Moore's Law also has created waves of improvement in the processes on which education most relies: how people can get and use information and how they can communicate with one another

A different problem occurs when dependent learners are paired with a Stage 3 or Stage 4 teacher who delegates responsibility that the learner is not equipped to handle. (I developed the entire SSDL model just to gain the insight reported in the following paragraph.) With such students, humanistic methods may fail. Many will not be able to make use of the "freedom to learn," because they lack the skills such as goal-setting, self-evaluation, project management, critical thinking, group participation, learning strategies, information resources, and self-esteem, which make self-directed learning possible--skills such as those described by Guglielmino (1977), Oddi (1986), and Cafarella and O'Donnell (1987).

The teachers quoted in this book want students to be more self-directing, but they have no pedagogical method for helping students move from dependency to self-direction. That is what the Staged Self-Directed Learning Model proposes.

Unless self-direction is explicitly encouraged, "free" schools and "open" programs may work only for those whose family background has already prepared them for self-direction (Tuman, 1988).

The abundance of information and the poverty of attention could be the cause of changes in thinking processes.

Sandbothe argues that the ‘comprehensive and systematic development of reflective judgement at all levels of the population and on a global scale is the central task for a democratic educational system in the twenty-first century’ (Sandbothe, 2000, p. 67). This might not be promoted by the new ways of accessing information.

Greenfield is concerned however, that if people do not have access to a robust conceptual framework developed over time with the help of knowledgeable others, they might have problems constructing knowledge (Greenfield, 2004).

connectivism

digital natives and immigrants, residents and visitors,

I'd like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn't connecting us as much as we think it is. It's largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.

Call it relationship inflation. Nominally, you have a lot more relationships — but in reality, few, if any, are actually valuable.

Thin relationships are the illusion of real relationships. Real relationships are patterns of mutual investment. I invest in you, you invest in me. Parents, kids, spouses — all are multiple digit investments, of time, money, knowledge, and attention. The "relationships" at the heart of the social bubble aren't real because they're not marked by mutual investment .