Connectivism is a riff on social-constructionism which I’ve always taken as a given in Papert’s work especially when he was so influenced by Vygotsky as well as Piaget. So sure it’s on my radar but the digital social networks that Downes and Siemens had in mind when they coined the term haven’t developed in the way they’d imagined, in fact quite the opposite. What we’re seeing is that such networks intended to bring us together have become divisive, e.g. Twitter spats, Facebook wars, fake news, etc.
Surprisingly, Techcrunch ran a article recently predicting the death of social media as we migrate from the age of sharing to age of privacy:
I think this shows the danger in tying your flag to a particular mast, e.g. a technology fad like social media which will no doubt morph into something quite different. Apple tried a similar manuvre, although commercially directed, to “own” project-based learning by calling it “challenge based learning” that just happened to require their devices, e.g. iPads, etc to do it.
