For me, my best thinking and my best learning requires hard work. I expect to put in the effort if I want progress or productivity. Oftentimes, for me, all that work turns out to be futile. I work and I work and I work with nothing really to show for it but that effort. And that’s just fine with me. I love the journey.

As I think about your post, I considered my purposes for enrolling in the ET MOOC, and, more importantly, my purposes for building a personal learning network. I want the engagement, I want the connectivity. But there is so much out there that, at some point, only I can decide what is important. I can’t let anyone else tell me what that is. I see lots of gentle on-ramps out there (Wikipedia being the most obvious example), but for my learning, I have to sift through thousands of posts and thousands of tweets to find those nuggets that speak to me, that I want to seek out for more information, to learn from.

Personal learning networks should, in my mind, be built slowly, one brick at a time. They should be lowercase ventures because they should always be in flux, always under revision, always reflective. A personal learning network should never be so monolithic as to be UPPERCASE. My first personal learning network (and maybe one of my very best) was only one brick. And that was more than enough at that time. It kept me intellectually engaged. 

But building a personal learning network, like participating in a MOOC, can be exhausting. I approach the ET MOOC with the advice from Bill Murray in Meatballs: 

Rudy: I don’t wanna hurt anyone. I just want them to like me.

Tripper: Why? You make one good friend a summer and you’re doing pretty well.

I think about MOOCs and connectivism and personal learning networks the same way. If I seek out an opportunity to engage, especially in a big, messy opportunity like a MOOC, then if I can make one good contact, one good person to follow, then I’ll feel like I’m doing pretty well. And if I don’t, then I’ll keep trying. If I find one person to collaborate on one project, then I’ll have something marvelous that I never would have had if I didn’t put in the effort. That effort, to me, is MAKING.

So I can put as much or as little effort into this as I want. If it wakes me up at 3:00 am to think about, then I’m happy, although I’ll be nodding off later (what Caleb called my “nana-nap”). If I’m too tired, or unwilling/unable to make the effort, then I’ll beg off and sit with Crash or go watch TV or go to the Arthur Murray Dance Party with my wife (like we did last night). 

This probably doesn’t address your concerns as explicitly as you would like, but I commend your efforts and appreciate your post. Keep up the good work. And don’t get frustrated. I’ll conclude with my belief that “fatigue is a good thing,” which leads me to a slanted reference to another movie that captures how I feel about making my personal learning network every day (in lowercase letters):