Just a quick question before I start a long weekend early — how do people learn in a networked world? George Siemens, a Canadian educator, has advanced a notion called connectivism that provides a conceptual framework for what changes when institutions are supplanted by ad-hoc teams.

Let me thank unmediated.org for bringing the theory of connectivism to my attention. I noodled around and found a biography for George Siemens and an interview with him that will give you the flavor of his ideas. The piece referenced on unmediated had to do with Siemens’ observations on the breakdown of the old media gatekeeper system: “I no longer read newspapers or watch the evening news. I used to go to one source of information to get a thousand points of information. Now, I go to a thousand sources of information to get one point of information. I have become the filter and mediator.”

This observation is reminiscent of the newsmaster concept that was floating around the web some months ago (if you haven’t seen the Googlezon ( EPIC) video, take a five minutes to amuse yourself with a sci-fi “documentary” on how the Net swallows newspapers). And just this morning unmediated pointed to a related discussion about how top bloggers are becoming what are called newshubs — tour guides of a sort in a world awash with information. Interesting times. I’ll post again Tuesday.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media