Finish This Sentence: A Learner is Like a.......

It took me quite a while to come up with a good analogy to complete this thought.  When I first began to think about how I would represent a learner as an analogy in relation to Connectivism,  I thought of a spider. 

A learner is like a spider constructing his or her own web of knowledge, connections, and experiences.  As I pondered this analogy further I began to think that this was not the most apt one.  A spider creates its own web, but rarely interacts with other spiders.  Connectivism is also about the connectedness of learners and how we benefit from our interactions with each other.  As George Siemens says in the video The Changing Nature of Knowledge,  “The learners themselves, the connections they form with each other, the connections they form with databases, with other sources of knowledge, is really a primary point of learning,……the network becomes the learning, the network the learners create.”  This led me to think of the learner as a bee or an ant.   

Bees and ants both live in communities and construct networks for themselves and for the others in the community where they live.  There is an interconnection to what they do and they benefit from what the other members of the community do.  As I thought about this analogy, I realized that there was a piece missing from that, too. While learners are actively creating their own learning networks, they are evolving and changing.   

So would a more apt analogy be that learners are more like caterpillars evolving or metamorphosing into butterflies?   

 Participating in this interconnected network of knowledge causes the learner to change and evolve.  However, this didn’t exactly sit right with me either because although the butterfly interacts with and helps the flowers interact with each other, and is an integral part of how the plants interact with each other, the butterfly itself only changes once, and doesn't spend very much time interacting with and benefiting from interacting with other butterflies.  I thought about it some more and finally, it came to me….

A learner is like a drop of water.  A drop of water is part of a world-wide network or system.  A drop of water is constantly changing and adapting…at different times it exists as a solid, liquid, or gas.  It may spend time on its own or with others.  It goes through complicated processes and undergoes dynamic and fundamental changes. It affects and is affected by all that it interacts with.  As it grows, or as many drops come together they become stronger or more amplified, even able to dig through stone, like how a learning network grows and becomes stronger or more amplified. As George Siemens says in Connectivism:  A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, "Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing."  This to me better represents a learner in our interconnected world.   Alone we can do little, but as our connections and knowledge grow we have the power to move mountains.