Hossein Eskandari (PhD); Hashem Fardanesh (PhD); Seyyed Mahdi Sajjadi (PhD)
Volume 5, Issue 15 , January 2010, , Pages 34-67
Abstract
Many important events have occurred in recent decades; more over criticism of ordered Newtonian world according complexity paradigm has been continued. These occurrences have challenged education with new needs and problems. For replying to this new condition, many models and theories have been developed. ...
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Many important events have occurred in recent decades; more over criticism of ordered Newtonian world according complexity paradigm has been continued. These occurrences have challenged education with new needs and problems. For replying to this new condition, many models and theories have been developed. The aim of this article is to explore one of this new theories-named connectivism that has been under consideration of many researchers in recent years. For this aim, researcher has gathered text documents and analyzed them to answer questions about this theory by descriptive-analytic methods: can connectivism be a theory? What criticisms challenge it? Is it essentially a new-build theory or has been built over previous theories? Analyzing of theoretical (and epistemological) bases of this theory according some criteria shows that connectivism can be seen as a theory. In comparison to behaviorism, cognitivism and constructivism, reliance of this theory on connective knowledge (or distributed knowledge) has been given a different epistemological base to it. However this theory still has no enough experimental support. So, applying it especially in the field of instructional design needs more research. Consequently, this theory can act as new coworker of existing learning theories not as their rival and especially can help to develop and direct e-learning in new spaces such as web 2.0.
