After having ended the Connected Learning BB Collaborate session on a seemingly excited note, I’m happy that they are recording the sessions!  There was so much information, the chat window was going a mile a minute, and it was difficult to effectively multitask.  I’m baffled at how people were able to do it on Twitter as well!

So, to answer one of the questions that was posed towards the end of the session: What skills and literacies are necessary for connected learning?  How do we develop these?

First, people need to be comfortable with the fast pace of the PLN.  The first several times I “lurked” for a #sschat, I ended up opening close to 60 tabs in my browser in an hour.  Talk about overwhelming!  There is no way that you can go through the resources that people offer at the time, but the 1 hour #sschat turned into about 2-3 hours of learning about resources that were out on the web that I had never known about.  What a gold mine!

My biggest goal for my adventure with #etmooc is to go from a consumer to a curator, creator, and collaborator.  I want to be the person offering those resources to people.  I have found ways to do it in my small community inside of my school, now I just need to expand my skills to be able to think fast, and share fast.  Finding the resource in my bookmarks, then tweeting it out, is one of those things that scares me to death.  How do they do that without skipping a beat?  So that is another skill that is needed to be a connected learner.

Organization… My bookmarks are organized, when people look at the things that I have, they get overwhelmed.  But my bookmarks are organized in Chrome.  There is nothing “social” about keeping all of those resources to myself!  I found a little extension to add to my Chrome browser, which I think will help, but that means that the resource needs to be open.  There must be a better way…

This is definitely something that I will be coming back to, as I don’t have hardly any of the answers I need to answer the question!