I did not know anything about Dr. George Siemens until I read Weller’s 25 years of Ed Tech. I saw his name popping-up a few times in different chapters and that is why I chose him. When I started looking for information about him, I unintentionally found out that he was born in Mexico, my motherland. Because of this, I felt a connection and became more interested on finding out about his background and his work.
George’s great grandparents were German Mennonites who actually settled in Canada back in the 1900. Because the Canadian government wanted to send their children to public schools his family decided to relocate again, this time to a Mennonite village in Mexico. George was born in 1964 in a rural farming community of Mexico where he lived until he was 6 years old. During that time, he and his family did not have access to electricity or paved roads so they moved around by horse and buggy. Farm life in a small rural community provided him with a deep understanding of how information and knowledge work under limited circumstances. He and his family moved back to the province of Manitoba in Canada. He is now an internationally known author, researcher and theorist in the field of learning, knowledge management, and technology (CSU, 2015).
“George Siemens is an educator and researcher on learning, networks, analytics and visualization, openness, and organizational effectiveness in digital environments” (EDUCAUSE, 2021). He is considered a pioneer in the concept of Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs. Through his work in technology, online learning and sense-making ,he proposed Connectivism as a theoretical framework that understands learning in a digital age and suggests that technology plays an important role in the learning process.
A great interview with Dr. George Siemens can be found here where he talks about the evolution of MOOCs and his prediction of where they are headed.
“Education is not about building better Googlers” (Siemens, 2010)
Learn more about this on the video below.
Thank you for highlighting Dr George Siemens! I too found him after his name showed up in the required readings, very interesting person. I wonder if he had any specific contributions in Spanish publications as well?
Hi Emma, and thank you for reading my post. I agree with you, Dr. Siemens seems to be a very interesting person. I was really curious to find out if he was fluent in Spanish and if he had specific contributions in the same language as well. I did find out that his family was from Germany, they migrated to Canada and then to Mexico where George was born. However, in one of the interviews I found of him they mentioned that his family lived in a very isolated location and they would only speak in an old German dialect, this made me think that he was not fluent in Spanish at all (that is just my assumption). Regardless of his proficiency in Spanish, I also found out that his book “Knowing Knowledge” has been translated to many different languages including Spanish and sold all over the world. One interesting fact that our instructor George Veletsianos shared as part of my feedback is that George Siemens also took and completed the MALAT program from RRU that we are all enrolled in.