Week 7 – DIY Learning

Format

  • Face-to-face and online: The class will meet this week, and activities to do on your own are also on deck.
  • Synchronous and asynchronous: Live conversations will occur during class time, and everything else will be on your own time.

Quotes

“All education is self-education.  Period.  It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting in a college classroom or a coffee shop.  We don’t learn anything we don’t want to learn.
Those people who take the time and initiative to pursue knowledge on their own are the only ones who earn a real education in this world.  Take a look at any widely acclaimed scholar, entrepreneur or historical figure you can think of.  Formal education or not, you’ll find that he or she is a product of continuous self-education.”

Mark and Angel Hack Life, 2010

“If I can make you a 21st century learner, you’ll make yourself a 21st century teacher.”

-Mathieu, Saturday morning while writing this page 😉

“Give me the kid with a passion to learn and a curiosity to discover and I will take him or her over the less passionate kid with a huge IQ every day of the week.” IQ “still matters, but CQ and PQ … matter even more.”

-Tom Friedman about the curiosity quotient

Overview

Learning happens, from Twitter to the water cooler to the classroom. But you, as the learner, are the main person in charge of what you learn, and how you learn it. This module is about the different learning contexts, and how you can take charge of your own learning without necessarily relying solely on schools or your employer.

Learning objectives

  • Reflect on the differences between training and education.
  • Get introduced to the idea of performance support as a just-in-time learning process.
  • Become more knowledgeable about massive open online courses (MOOCs), and understand the difference between large-scale computer-driven ones and connectivist ones.
  • Get introduced to the “Maker” movement.
  • Reflect on things you want to learn, and strategies to learn them.

Action items

1. Watch Liz Krane about her quest to learn everything.

2. Watch this interview with Jane Bozarth, trainer extraordinaire, book author, and participant in the #lrnchat on Twitter every Thursday night.

3. Read The Impact and Role of Performance Support: Conrad Gottfredson by Bill Brandon, Learning Solutions Magazine, 2012.

4. If you don’t know Pat Sine, she recently retired from her position as the Director of IT Client Support & Services at the University of Delaware, and has been bookmarking and pinning with us. We co-presented this session on MOOCs at the Summer Faculty Institute last June (optional additional materials here, including Dave Cormier’s video).

5. Consistent with the idea of constructionism that has been practiced in this course, the Maker movement is gaining steam as a valid learning approach where participants create physical objects and use the internet to support each other. Read How the ‘Maker’ Movement Plans to Transform the U.S. Economy by Sam Gustin, Time Business, 2012 (Optional: For more info on constructionism, see Gary Stager’s website).

6. Watch a couple of episodes of the Super Awesome Sylvia Mini-Maker Show.

7. As your weekly blog post, identify something or a topic you have wanted to learn for a while and never took the time to learn. It doesn’t have to be related to your profession, but it would be better if it did. You could pick, “learn how to use problem-based learning with large undergrad classes”, “learn how to create audio podcasts”, “learn to read and write HTML pages”, or “use a Smartboard for teaching history”, for instance. Identify different approaches you could take to learn on this topic depending on the time frame you would have to learn it (I need an answer in 10 minutes, in one week, or I can extend it to a year of more), including online and face-to-face approaches. Try to find and link to places, content, or communities that could help you learn.

Examples of places to learn:

8. Submit the URL of your blog post to the assignment titled Week 7: Blog post on Canvas. The submission is due by 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 13, EDT, and will be graded as a part of the weekly projects.

9. Check the course’s class feed for other posts by colleagues, and comment on their posts. You should at least read and comment on two or three posts, but you’re welcome to visit as many as you want. As a part of the online participation grade, you should also contribute and discuss on the different social media outlets, such as Diigo, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest.

More to explore

Check our Diigo group and check for related tags.

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