The Study Of Connectivism And Organization Of Teaching, Learning From Its Prospective

Since the end of last century, thanks to the rapid development of network technology, the accesses to information approach for people are greatly widened, and people’s study activities are provided by stronger technical support. So it is said that the arrival of E-learning brings learners and educators greatest changes. But from the view of learning theory research, all the formal learning theories, such as behaviorism which emphasize "stimulation-reaction" connection, cognitivism which compare people’s cognition to computer information processing, or constructivism which considers study as a new and old experience interaction process, just by the process, learners’personalized cognitive structures could be founded, have their disadvantages to explain network learning. A Canada scholar Siemens thinks carefully after long-term research and practice, he analyzes social behavior mechanism in E-learning, points that because formal theories all view study as a process always occurring in oneself, so they have much troubles to give people a convincing explanation for E-leaning. This senior learning process will involve multiple roles, who are always enriching, expanding, and even reconstructing knowledge. Therefore, he proposes connectivism, and advocates viewing E-learning from a new angle. Additionally, we know that behaviorism, cognitivism and constructivism are all emerge in a low-level network technology era. But now, people’s lives and study way have been combined by nowadays technologies, learning theory describing principles and processes must reflect basic social and technological environment. Our research tries to examine the entire learning organization evolvement mechanism, and as far as possible to consider technical contents when we describe learning principles.As connectivism appeared at the end of 2005, it is a young learning theory. In China, papers relate to connectivism are no more than ten, papers involving this theory as major content are rare, degree thesis is none. Therefore, in order to promote the study on connectivism in China, we take connectivism as starting and key points in our research. In Canada, Siemens and Downes have worked much about connectivism. A lot of research results have been accumulated. Siemens founded Elearnspace, which is a professional academic research site. All the connectivism followers will go there discussing about the theory. Siemens collecting discussion results regularly, with his other late achievement he sent the the research blog to every subscriber’s mailbox all over the world. Additionally, the three online courses named CCK08, CCK09 and CCK11 given by them are important reference materials to study connectivism. We hope that on the basis of introducing research results of connectivism, we can analyze its innovation coparing with former study theories, then we could find many appropriate arguments in psychology, system science and so on, to support the exploration for humen study in connectivism.As representative research results in the second period of system science, self-organization theory is the only theoretical basis for connectivism. Obviously, connectivism research pay attention to thought method from system science. Since psychology established its scientific position, the theoretical basis of learning theory always is found in psychology. Therefore, in order to understand the main opinions of connectivism better, it is necessary to study self-organization theory seriously. From the research progress of self-organization theory perspective, since it was put forward in the early 60s, not only itself has become a rich perfect scientific system, and in biology, medicine, agriculture, engineering technology, and even the social, economic and management, culture, history, and other fields people found the organization phenomenon. these fully affirmed the instruction significance of self-organization theory, which study self-organization phenomenon mainly, as a cross-sectional scientific methodology. So, we think that trying to put the organization theory into education teaching research field also has a positive meaning. This research focuses on the union of the organization theory and the education teaching, to change the current situation in education field, there people have not pay their enough attention to the study on self-organization theory.Usually, after a learning theory is introduced, people concerns about this theory’s application most. That is to say, with the help of this theory, what can we do to teach better and study better. Comparing to some theories which mainly research on contents, connectivism pay its attention on the organization question of learning contents. Our research study on“organization”as main perspective, we first discuss how to organize the teaching contents. From a scientific and standard view, instructional design is our primary concern point. The traditional instructional design always are around the predetermined target, committed to the design of the universal unified teaching system, but could not consider and plan the specific situation of teaching enough, so in general, they are designed as a linear processes. The linear instructional design in specific implementation process is difficult to adapt to the complex and changeable teaching process, also has lots of disadvantages for the implementation of differentiation teaching. Instructional design in a new generation instructed by connectivism and self-organization theory will organized teaching contents in "nonlinearity" form, and will pay more attention to the generative thinking way in all concrete implementation process of teaching. It will be advantageous to realize personalized design to some specific problems, and it is also for dynamic adjustment in the whole design process. Nonlinear instructional design is our key research contents when we try to apply connctivism to instruct the organization of teaching contents. The improvement of instructional design always served for the formal teaching activities in school. If we do not consider specially the educational situation in school, is there some more direct and pervasive ways to help students’study? We think that knowledge diagrammatic representation technology could help students with organizing learning contents, in this process, the generations of knowledge meaning and understandings are promoted. Additionally, these meanings and understandings differs from one people to another, so nonlinear instructional design may explore a feasible way for difference teaching.Knowledge diagrammatic representation technology connected closely with learning theories for a long time. For example, concept map is put forward as a kind of study technology by J.D.Novak according to David P. Ausubel’s meaningful learning theory. When we apply connectivism to study on how to organize learning contents, our study will first summarize and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of existing knowledge diagrammatic representation technology, and then select the essential parts, put forward the improvement strategies to disadvantages, in order to help people organize their learning contents efficiently, and adapt to the era of network learning situation better.