I’ve been thinking about my responsibility for learning a lot this week. Certainly the more experienced online folk here in #etmooc have been influential and helpful, and have shared their tips, tricks and other very practical suggestions. This sense of community has been invaluable as I start to ponder why I am doing this.
Part of my answer to the responsibility question is inspired by Dave Cormier’s session on Rhizomatic Learning http://davecormier.com/ . He talks about some of the factors that differentiate an online community from an online course, one of them being outcomes. Benjamin Wilcoff’s http://bit.ly/XkyMAW vlog about learners taking responsibility for their own “slice” of learning resulted in people in the community reflecting about how to actually do this and got me thinking about pie.
How do I figure out which slice of the pie to select? In fact, how do I even choose which pie? If I stop to think about all of the different, potentially yummy pies out there I begin to get…yep, overwhelmed. So I will allow myself to feed my brain and my heart by taking bites from the various forkfuls offered by the people beginning to populate my PLN. I’ve been doing that. There is some very good pie out there, and some I’m not so enamoured of, but my appetite is increasing.
One of the “lessons” I took from the Rhizomatic Session was that learning won’t really happen if I don’t figure out some goals and go after them. I have struggled with the concept, but after exploring that a bit I now understand that I did have to show up with some goals, but I was also perfectly free to expand and change them.
My initial goal when I started this process of #etmooc was to eat as much “pie” as I could. Now I realize that in order to truly learn and grow (and not just increase my dress size) I would have to start baking and offering some pies of my own and getting some exercise as I move around and offer forkfuls to others. I have commented on some blogs and interacted here and there, but it’s time to step up my game.
One small contribution is that I have started offering some forkfuls to my colleagues at work. Some of them will be enthusiastic, some will be cautious, and some may even categorically state that they are on diets. I hope to find myself some people who already love pie, and perhaps stimulate the appetites of others. My goal right now is to become a better baker.
Photo Credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/68691112@N00/4704792037/”>jamieanne</a> via <a href=”http://compfight.com”>Compfight</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>cc</a>
