In my learning, I tend to gravitate towards connectivism. We live in an information overloaded society. Knowing how to access quality sources and weed out the clutter is of paramount importance. When I was a child, I loved spending hours in the library reading. My favorite books were encyclopedias. I remember wandering through article after article and getting giddy with joy after seeing a particularly interesting diagram. I realized at a young age that even if I had completely read every encyclopedia, there would still be information out there that I needed or wanted to know. As an undergraduate, I studied French Literature. At first I found myself overwhelmed by the amount of articles written about any given work. I developed a method of finding what was most relevant by surveying the bibliographies of a number of articles and looking for common sources, I would then concentrate my efforts on the most referenced items. This was during the time when most references were not published on the internet and I had to manually browse through index cards, microfiche, and the like.
Fortunately, today this method of research and learning has been greatly facilitated by the availability of online resources. Now I simply browse Web2.0 products such as blogs, YouTube, Wikipedia and the like. I can now follow a reference at the click of a link and determine whether or not the information is relevant to me or not. The very reason that I am completing this certificate program is that I browsed several LinkedIn profiles of training professionals and found that many had attended this program.
That being said, I do not feel that connectivism works in every situation. In a previous training engagement, I was a flight attendant instructor. In this safety critical position, we had to rely on good old fashioned behaviorism. There is no way a flight attendant can be trained to open a door in an emergency by browsing YouTube. This would be the result:
In summary, I believe the learning paradigm needs to be adapted to the learner and learning object. The instructor must be attuned to the learner's needs and flexible enough to adapt an a case by case basis. Having a solid foundation in all of these paradigms will allow the instructor select the most appropriate delivery method.
