Influence of the Digital Technologies to the Process of Learning

The present paper studies the influence of the digital technologies to the process of learning. A common principle of all the traditional learning theories, which developed in a time when learning was not taking place through technology, is that learning occurs inside a person. In today’s digital environment, however, we frequently need to act by drawing information which is stored within a database or an organization and is manipulated by technology. The traditional learning theories do not address this kind of learning, defined as actionable knowledge and occurring outside of people. The need to bridge this gap led to the development of connectivism, a new theory for understanding learning in our digital era. The paper outlines the headlines of connectivism, which is based on an integration of principles related to chaos, networks, and self-organization theories, and exposes briefly the reported criticisms for it and the recently developed teaching approaches related to it. A framework is also presented, due to Siemens, for organizing and comparing the primary traditional learning theories with connectivism. Our final conclusion is that none of the existing theories can stand alone as a complete theory for learning. The combination of them, however, seems to provide an adequate framework for understanding the process of learning.