<p>I believe that the roles &nbsp;of the Instructional Designer and Teacher are changing and must change in the face of the ever-increasing onslaught of information every human being faces today.&nbsp; Those roles must merge into the Sharer, who shows new technologies and connections to information to others while always keeping in mind his/her own role as perpetual student.&nbsp;</p> <p>To do this, the Sharer must, at least in some respects, plant the environment for others, set up what may grow into connections and give opportunity for emergence in ways even the Sharer may not envision yet, but in a reasonably “safe” environment for exploration.</p>

The Teacher/Sharer, parents and student collaborate on ensuring that whatever method the student is using is assisting in wayfinding toward those goals.&nbsp; If more connections are made, so much the better.&nbsp; But along the path, like signposts, each of the connections (parents, Teacher/Sharers) and&nbsp;each tool (video, Second Life, writing, drawing, blog, podcast,&nbsp; etc.) used&nbsp;to connect&nbsp;to people&nbsp;will prompt the student for responses (dates, opinions, responses to readings) of the set curriculum, but framed in the context best suited for that student.&nbsp;A&nbsp;record of the waypoints shows how the student connected and which connections seemed to spark the most activity and best learning.&nbsp; If the student misses a certain number of waypoints, the direction of the connections is adjusted until success is achieved.

We argue that learning occurs in networks, and therefore, that the properties of successful networks are also the properties of successful learning environments. We don't 'apply' this in any strict sense - we would never force people to be connectivists. Indeed, within the learning environment, we believe there should be diversity; we believe people should be free to choose their own form of learning.

To me, <span style="font-style: italic;">far more</span> complex - and insightful - forms of reasoning are being created through the interplay among thousands, or millions, of individual content elements. Where each content element may by itself appear to be <span style="font-style: italic;">simple</span>, it is the interconnections between them that creates a much more complex, deep, and <span style="font-style: italic;">rich</span> tapestry of meaning, <span style="font-style: italic;">far more</span> than could be created merely using linguistic devices.

It is substantially <span style="font-style: italic;">harder</span> to work with the disorder and complexity we see within a connectivist network. Because linguistic (syntactical and semantical) descriptions of the concepts and entities in such a network just barely touch the surface, and students must therefore immerse themselves in the process of reasoning in such a system, rather than merely reading about it.