Dive Summary:

• Paul McFedries, writer for the IEEE Inside Technology Spectrum, highlights a few of the concepts behind the emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as connectivism and activity theory.
• According to the theory of connectivism, learning is the connection formed between the abstract concept in a student's head and its real-world applications.
• Activity theory, a related concept, contends that to learn is to do; while connectivism traces learning as the connection between abstract and real knowledge, activity theory emphasizes learning through praxis.

From the article:

"... This learning-by-doing approach has been called activity theory, and it’s finding a home in many 21st-century learning environments because technology makes it so much easier to actively engage in a subject’s connective knowledge. For example, you can document your learning in a free blog hosted by Blogger or WordPress; you can engage other people who are also learning (or have already learned) the topic through Facebook or Twitter; you can use online resources to store and share bookmarks related to the field; you can even create your own wiki.
 ..."