Learning Theories – Adrian's Blog

For our first week’s assignment, we were to familiarize ourselves with behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism, and connectivism and create a learning theory matrix. I was already pretty familiar with behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism from learning about them in my undergrad classes. I was not as familiar with connectivism. I had heard of it before, but never really studied it. I spent a lot of my time researching what exactly this theory is and how it aligns with technology use in educational settings. Once I began reading I was very interested in learning more about connectivism. I realized that I already am using methods that follow this theory in my classroom without realizing it. It made me stop and think if I’m doing this with any of the other theories. I spent a short period of time reading about each theory because the last time I thoroughly studied them was years ago. During my studies, I decided to challenge myself to think of at least one way I was using each theory with my current class or with previous classes. I came up with some examples that I included in my matrix under examples of specific technology. One thing I learned is that these theories are already influencing my teaching practices, even if I hadn’t acknowledged it before. Now that I am fully aware, I can use my newfound knowledge to improve the way I do things. I did encounter some challenges with this assignment. Like I said before, I haven’t studied the theories since college and I was pretty unfamiliar with connectivism so I had to do some research. Another challenge I faced was that I tend to overthink things and in the process I sometimes overwhelm myself. I have never had a blog before so I spent a lot of time overthinking how it should look, what it should say, etc. I had to bring myself back to reality so I could actually complete the assignment.