I decided to give 2 presentations on connectivism, to finish up my CCK09 course. The first opportunity took place last weekend @Barcamp 3 Ghent. The presentation can be found on Slideshare.

My presentation starts with some observations out of my own classroom. I ask my own students every year (pre service teachers, professional bachelors, 3-years of study) if they think they can learn from and with others via Twitter, weblogs, podcasts, Facebook etc. And every year, I get the same type of answers for all the applications I mention, except for Facebook. I took Twitter as an example here, but it could be replaced with blogs or podcasts or…

My mid-years always respond with “Twitter is trivial, there is nothing to learn from the update of a celeb telling how they are doing”. My last-years don’t use Twitter, but they start to reflect on ways how Twitter can be used for learning. They start seeing the value of a network as well. And here comes the funny thing: once those students are graduated, they start following paid courses about the applications mentioned above.

The exception is Facebook. They don’t see Facebook as a learning and networking tool, but they do use it that way.

I always tell them during my lessons: please listen to me now, while it is a part of your curriculum, in two years you will have to pay someone to learn the same in a seperate course. But it doesn’t really help.

So what changes in their perception of a tool in those 2 years? A first simple answer can be found in their age. They are two years older after graduation. A second answer will be the difference of being a pre-service teacher and an in-service teacher. I think we can assume that your network starts to grow once you are out of school. So it looks like an in-service teacher starts to use other tools than Facebook to build his/her network. And last but not least, I think our students underestimate the value of learning via a (diverse) network and the importance of building that network.

Since I started talking about learning via networks (5, 6 years) my students’ reactions stayed the same. Will this ever change?

Note: I don’t have proof for all this. It is just my observation of the day.