Project One, lead by Nirmal Trivedi, is a re-design of Georgia Tech’s first-year reading program — a hybrid experience focused around a common reading (The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang) and building digital community. It hopes to introduce new students to the campus community and to help cultivate their academic identity. I’ve been helping to develop this program over the last several months, but I’d like to use it as an example of the concepts of connectivism — an educational theory born out of the earliest MOOC experiments of the last decade. In this session I would introduce some of the principles of connectivist learning and how they’ve filtered into the construction of Project One in order to prompt a larger conversation about how “using technology in the classroom” is distinct from pedagogical approaches that attempt to understand and harness the affordances of digital culture.
