Connectivism as a learning model.

In watching Connectivism by Erin Jonesrebrandt (video clip) I am not sure I am seeing anything really new. Or maybe it was something already talked about in education during my degree years: the ideas of mental hooks, places to put infomation on that related to other information. Also there is the problem of trying to learn isolated facts or skill with no context. It seems that the social media tools are providing the context for the information. But I guess I need to point out that they do offer something a bit unique, the differing perspectives of the authors of that information. 
Perhaps one thing we need to keep in mind is that somehow we are going to have to teach students how to evaluate the credibility of the resources they encounter.
In reading George Siemens, Connectivism:A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, "Knowledge is growing exponentially. In many fields the life of knowledge is now measured in months and years." I wonder about that. What is knowledge? How much of what is posted is really brand new. After all Proverbs mentions that there is nothing new under the Sun. Or is it that it is just so much more convenient to redistribute and access our knowledge. But then again we also have the creation mandate of stewardship and development of the earth, implying that there are things we need to learn about or develop knowledge about. 
I disagree with "The “half-life of knowledge” is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete." (Siemens) If the "knowledge" was misinformed then yes -- round vs flat earth for instance, but real knowledge no, it may not be on the surface or forefront anymore, but it will still be part of a foundation or hook. 
I also wonder about the conclusion that "The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe." I think there are exceptions to this, especially in a Christian's life. "True faith is a sure knowledge, whereby I except everything as true which God has revealed in His word . . . " (Heidelberg Catechism). From a secular viewpoint, there is no foundation to knowledge, but from a Christian viewpoint we always have a starting point and context, God's creation and His word. 
Given all that, I think the the more experiences one has, the more viewpoints one examines, or the more connections one gets, the more a person can learn. And our ability to learn is going to depend not only on the connections we have formed, but also on the springboard of the prior learning we have made that help to make sense of the new materials. I also think you might find a pretty strong link between the idea of Connectivism and the idea of Cooperative Learning in classrooms, one on a digital level, the other on a face to face interactive level.
Downe's blog offers, to me, a very different version of Connectivism: 'learning is the formation of connections in a network', "A connection exists between two entities when a change of state in one entity can cause or result in a change of state in the second entity.", "networks 'learn' by automatically adjusting the set of connections between individual neurons or nodes."
We had a series of lectures on Brain based learning a couple of years ago, the upshot which was how connections are formed between concepts. The more frequently the concepts are associated, the better the connection. I wonder how that all fits together.