This week, the Siemens article “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age”, really stood out to me. I must owe the “wow” factor I experienced to an unfamiliar term I read referred to as the “half-life of knowledge”. To my discovery, I learned it refers to a particular time span from where the knowledge was first learned to it becoming obsolete. According to the American Society of Training and Documentation, within the last 10 years, our knowledge has doubled, and is continuously doubling every 18 months! One of the learning trends showed that “many learners will move into a variety of different, possibly unrelated work fields over the course of their lifetime”. This truly made me wonder, why is it that now more than ever, individuals are changing their careers? I wonder if one of the significant reasons that individuals are more likely to change their work-fields multiple times throughout their life span is due to technological advancement. For example, companies are being more enticed to replace human workers with robots, for the reason they are cheaper, can work 24/7, and make fewer errors. The transportation industry (taxi & bus drivers) is currently one of the most vulnerable professions, owing to the new technology of self-driving vehicles. For that reason, millions of vehicle operators will be left jobless in the foreseeable future and forced to retrain and search for a new occupation. In relating back to the article, this example is proof of the importance of continual education, especially when job security is becoming far more uncertain.Â
Month: January 2022
Hello fellow classmates and Professor Madland! I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you’ve stumbled on my very first ever blog post. This week’s readings did a phenomenal job of being informational and giving a base understanding of the importance of PLN networks and the need for development in both our network skills and digital literacies. Amidst a pandemic, it raises the point that it is now more crucial than ever before that were made realize to the growing rise of usage in technological platforms. Evidently, what stood out to me in the article “What is a Personal Learning Network (PLN)”, was the highlighted theme that we must understand the importance of developing our own “network skills and digital literacies”. Nearing the end of the article, the author spoke to the value of utilizing your own personal learning network to become “adaptable lifelong learners” and to be best equipped for whatever life, jobs, and school will look like in the nearing future. It gave very relevant examples, one being the onset of COVID 19, which due to global distancing measures, jobs, schools, and means of transport were forced to change. Unfortunately, the article does state that with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, it is apparent that there will be jobs that are lost as a result. It gave a funny futuristic example (but very well possible) that truck drivers today, may instead be forced to retrain and become drone pilots tomorrow. As for a Wonder, it came from the article “What are Personal Learning Networks”. The author said “If you assume students are only learning from e-learning courses you are failing to leverage a huge part of the learning process.” This made me wonder if the plethora of networks utilized by students other than e-learning itself, varies greatly between age groups and if there are studies that prove this. This led me to further wonder what a personal learning network may look like in impoverished countries, where many of its students don’t have access to technology. Which I assume would act as a barrier for its population of students to roam the existing online networks.
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