Broaden your community

With the fast development of technology, learning has been changed from interpersonal into interpersonal. What resources you can have is more important than what knowledge you can possess at a certain point. Building up a broader community certainly will help you keep up with the rapid changes happened everyday.
However some people may be intimidated by the new technological tools. There is a video Alan Levine-New Media Consortium which introduces how we can deal with the technology. The man Alan Levine first points out the importance of building up the community by establishing the network of colleagues in or beyond one field. Then he suggests that in order to make the first step and experience the advantage of technology, people should be more brave and be willing to try new things. Sometimes it might be even necessary to push ourselves out of the comfort zone and put aside things that we are very familiar with. With the courage of experiment, one can definitely figure out the advantages of networking.
I also tried to join in the English Language Teaching community - one of the Google+ communities. The best thing I like about the community is that it allows you to browse a huge amount of information in a very short time. I can choose whatever catches my eyes first and go deeper to figure out more information about it. Thus can save time and offer the chance to get access to things that I may never get a way to know.

Which is more important: How or What?

A learner is like a node in a railway system. A complete and integrated railway system makes a well connected country. With the railway system, the country as well as the people become a whole. People can go any places by trains quickly as long as they are inside the system.

Chinese Railway System

As for the learners in technological age, it is more important to build a network within which multiple kinds of information can be shared rather than just learning the knowledge it self. Just as it is said in the article Connectivism:
A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, A network can simply be defined as connections between entities. Computer networks, power grids, and social networks all function on the simple principle that people, groups, systems, nodes, entities can be connected to create an integrated whole. In this article, it introduced the concept of connectivism, which refers to the integration of multiple principles including network and other theories. There is one point, Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources that I strongly agree with. Nowadays, learning is not only happened inside one person. Sharing information makes the learning process more effective and integrated. When we as learners connecting with another node, more information resources would be poured into our own knowledge database and the system will be more integrated as a whole.

This point is also raised in the video The network is the learning. The concept is that the way we are connected to other individuals is largely responsible for our ability to continue to stay current in the field. Actually we have already use network to daily life such as keeping connected with families and friends. But how we can adopt this concept into learning is the main problem that needed to be paid more attention to. By building up a network, learners can get access to knowledge concerning to other fields easily. One point from the video that I like the best is that what we know today is not as important as our ability to continue to stay current. Because the knowledge change rapidly, we can not expect that what we have learnt can last forever. So how to learn is more helpful than what is learnt.