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To what extent do existing learning theories meet the needs of today’s learners, and anticipate the needs of learners of the future?

If older theories are to be replaced by connectivism, then what are the grounds for this measure?

If connectivism is to build on older theories, how is the integration of the old and new theories to be conducted?

teachers who are more inclined and better prepared for what are known as student-oriented teaching practices, such as group work, individualized learning, and project work, are more likely to use digital resources. But in many cases, teachers were not adequately prepared to use the kind of teaching methods that make the most of technology

Overall, the most successful plans were incremental and built on lessons learned from previous plans.

There is increasing recognition of the important role of teachers in education. But we need to go beyond the idea that teaching is an art that requires exceptional talent. There are exceptional teachers, but we need to support the professional development of all teachers, and we can do so if we invest in the scientific base of the teaching profession and empower those very exceptional teachers to become leaders who inspire other teachers.Technology offers great tools in this respect. I'm thinking of platforms for collaboration in knowledge creation, where teachers can share and enrich teaching materials; of the amount of data that can be collected to measure students' learning; or of the increasing use of blended learning models in teachers' training, in which online lectures are combined with individualized expert support and feedback from peers. Because they enable feedback loops between theory and everyday classroom practice and are supported by a network of like-minded peers, these models have been found to be much more effective than the traditional model of courses, workshops, conferences and seminars

Perhaps the biggest example of that that I think lectures suck. In fact, I have a dislike for most face-to-face teaching practices in a University context. I have – what Bali and Meier describe as – an affinity for asynchronous learning.

rown to like the McWilliam’s (2009) idea of the “meddler in the middle” which is described a

And one thing I’ve learned is that everything is interesting if looked at at the appropriate level of detail. Now, it used to be that you’d have to seek out places to plunge in over your head. But now, in the age of the Internets, all we have to do is stand still and the flood waters rise over our heads. We usually call this “information overload,” and we’re told to fear it. But I think that’s based on an old idea we need to get rid of. Here’s what I mean. So, you know Flickr, the photo sharing site? If you go there and search for photos tagged “vista,” you’ll get two million photos, more vistas than you could look at if you made it your full time job. If you go to Google and search for apple pie recipes, you’ll get over 1.3 million of them. Want to try them all out to find the best one. Not gonna happen. If you go to Google Images and search for “cute cats,” you’ll get over seven million photos of the most adorable kittens ever, as well as some ads and porn, of course, because Internet. So that’s two million vista photos. 1.3 million apple pie recipes. 7.6 million cute cat photos. We’re constantly warned about information overload, yet we never hear one word single word about the dangers of Vista Overload, Apple Pie Overload, or Cute Kitten overload. How have the media missed these overloads! It’s a scandal!

For example, in the old days if you watched the daily half hour broadcast news or spent twenty minutes with a newspaper, you had done your civic duty: you had kept up with The News. Now we can see before our eyes what an illusion that sense of mastery was. There’s too much happening on our diverse and too-interesting planet to master it, and we can see it all happening within our browsers

t Wikipedia, the articles are often relatively short, but they typically have dozens or even hundreds of links. So rather than trying to get everything about, say, Shakespeare into a couple of thousand words, Wikipedia lets you click on links to other articles about what it mention — to Stratford-on-Avon, or iambic pentameter, or about the history of women in the theater.

In brief, the evolved form illustrates three kinds of aggregation of learners in either formal or informal learning: groups, networks, and sets. We originally conflated sets with a further emergent entity that is not a social form as such, which we have referred to as the collective

the tutor can respond directly to questions, adapt teaching to the learner’s stated or implied reactions, and the learner can choose whether to intervene in the course of his or her own tuition without contest with others (Dron, 2007

one-to-one dialogue represents an “ideal” form of guided learning, at least where there is a teacher who knows more than the learner and is able to apply methods and techniques to help that learner to learn