Stephen Downes

I have said from time to time, in asserting that 'to teach is to model and to demonstrate', that one should 'be the person you want your students to be'. Not original with me, and not original to connectivism, either, but surely at the heart of the theory, and the idea that learning is 'pattern recognition' explains why. Sessums finds links from all this to The Courage To Teach by Parker Palmer. "Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves." Now to somehow convince Sessums that Connectivism is not the work of Siemens alone (and he would be the first to say this!), that it is the world of a largish community of writers who have been working on this concept for years.