Learning to me means that I have acquired some “new” knowledge and that I am able to remember and replicate, demonstrate, explain or share it some time in the future. I’m able to connect this learned material with previous knowledge in some way to help make it stick. And as a teacher I am very aware that marks are not always a good reflection of actual learning but more of memorization, effort and at times articulation. We all know students who have learned the material but make choices to part hand in, complete or otherwise participate in the assessment to determine a mark, but have indeed learned the material.
Within in my network I’m finding that my learning is advancing in a much different way than in the past. It use to be that the "knowledge" I wanted to acquire was in a book and after reading and digesting the material I may have been able to learn something new. With the internet and all the information that is contained in it, the library for me is no longer my go to place for knowledge, my computer and the internet has taken over that position. On a daily basis I access it as I attempt to follow and clarifty my wonderings. Through the exposure to new ideas, the discussions that follow and the reflection on myself, my beliefs and my understandings, I have learned many things (many of which I hadn’t even intended to learn) but due to the ability to be a part of such diverse conversations on the web at all times of the night and day, my learning continues long after the school doors are shut. The biggest challenge I have with the learning is the sheer volume of infromation out there, all hyperlinks together which constantly entices me to follow tangents which often lead me far away from my original quest. It takes much focus to stay with a single thought!
Within in my network I’m finding that my learning is advancing in a much different way than in the past. It use to be that the "knowledge" I wanted to acquire was in a book and after reading and digesting the material I may have been able to learn something new. With the internet and all the information that is contained in it, the library for me is no longer my go to place for knowledge, my computer and the internet has taken over that position. On a daily basis I access it as I attempt to follow and clarifty my wonderings. Through the exposure to new ideas, the discussions that follow and the reflection on myself, my beliefs and my understandings, I have learned many things (many of which I hadn’t even intended to learn) but due to the ability to be a part of such diverse conversations on the web at all times of the night and day, my learning continues long after the school doors are shut. The biggest challenge I have with the learning is the sheer volume of infromation out there, all hyperlinks together which constantly entices me to follow tangents which often lead me far away from my original quest. It takes much focus to stay with a single thought!
My network is now populated with numerous teachers who blog (my RSS reader is full!), online professional articles and journals that relate to education, technology, mathematics education etc, educational professionals on my twitter list and colleagues I have at school. I find that through all of them, there are seeds of ideas that motivate me to explore, google and search out more information to help me understand how the new information may or may not help me be the best teacher I can be. This idea of learning is no longer found in a book …. As George Siemens says, its like a river flowing by and that one must dip a toe in.
This idea of knowing something for me implies that I would be able to step away from my network and I would be able to apply the knowledge in someway. I have no doubt that the network helps create new knowledge with everyone’s input affecting the final creation but if I only know where to find the information, this is a very low level of learning and I am aspiring to something more than this for both me and my students. I would feel like I had truly learned something from my network if I were able to pull it up from the depths of my memory and put it into action without the support of the network.
With this ever growing network I need to make much more of an effort to become a more active participant in the sharing process. I feel sort of like a wall flower watching everyone else dance - and I need to push myself to ask a boy to dance if I ever want to truly learn the steps :) I've watched long enough, so now I need to make a concerted effort to start leaving comments on people’s blogs (including references back to my own blog) along with a posing questions to this network to open up the dialague. I needed to get past my concern that I am not as articulate as I’d like to be and just do it! I need to start raising my "virtual" hand as well as blogging my own experiences as I do have ideas that would benefit from being put out there!
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