A learner is like a shopper

I regard an individual learner as a shopper, and the knowledge database is the shopping cart. As shoppers, when we walk into a supermarket, we’ll have a shopping cart with us to load items. But we’ll never put all items there into our carts. Instead, we’ll just choose what we need now. However, our choice will change according to our altering needs in the future. Similarly, in Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, Siemens (2005) considers that connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. As learners, we are required to distinguish what kind of information is needed and what is unneeded, thus we could collect important information in our database and directly delete or keep those unimportant information for future use.

In The Changing Nature of Knowledge, Siemens states that the learners themselves, the connection they form with each other, the connection that they form with databases, with other source of knowledge is really the primary point of learning. So in essence, the network becomes the learning. Each learner’s focus is different from others, thus they put different information into their database. But they also need to communicate and share useful information through connection with each other. It’s like each shopper buys different items from other shoppers when they are shopping. But they might have conversation with the cashier and other shoppers. And they might be told about valuable information of the goods they’ve never tried before. So their shopping cart is changing according to their needs.