New alignments for the digital age: insights into connected learning

In an age of ready access to people, online spaces and information, canonized formal knowledge acquisition is being disrupted. The emergence of socially constructed knowledge based on connected learning is democratising education and re-framing how formal and informal learning is considered. What we currently understand connected learning to be is limited to a combination of individual interests, networked and interdependent relationships with interconnected experiences that transcend temporal, spatial and cultural boundaries. Connected learning does not reduce learning to a phenomenon that takes place exclusively in the restricted spaces of formal education, neither does it focus exclusively on the online learning phenomenon. As such our conceptualisation of connected learning needs to deepen to effectively be able to rationalise how people learn in a digital age. This paper begins to unlock concepts and ideas associated with connected learning using current examples, setting out to build a theoretical model which begins to frame the complexities of conceptualized self-driven global learning interactions.