Being a Smart Fish

    Today after read Siemens’s article Connectivism: A Learning Theory for theDigital Age, I find that nowadays, the learners are just like fish in river. The most important issue for them is not knowing how to eat small fish, but knowing where to find small fish to eat.

    In fact, many years before, when I was still in high school, I have thought about similar things. I was really interested in the language learning and reading literatures from different countries at that time and I planned to study in these fields in the future. But one thing that made me confused is why I have to deal with many difficulties in physics and chemistry every day. After passing the college entrance exam, I would not meet these things anymore in my whole life. Someone told me that the things in these fields might help me solve some problems in daily life. I disagreed because the things we learnt were not practical and one thing important is that I would rather learn how to find ways of solving problems effectively. With the development of the technology, we almost can find all the answers on Google.

    In Siemens’s article, several sentences impressed me, “The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe”. Nowadays, with a laptop and Wi-Fi signal, we know everything in the world. It is much more important to know how to use those searching tools effectively than know the knowledge itself. Learners are like fish in a river. The necessary competence for living is not knowing how to eat and digest small fish, but where and how to find their food. Like the sentence in the video The Changing Nature ofKnowledge by George Siemens, “The network becomes learning.” This short sentence concludes the trend both in the Cyberworld and the teaching field. If we want to be a good teacher, we need to get start in the network using from now.