The document discusses five ideas for supporting more connected learning: 1) leveraging interest-driven learning, 2) collaborating across institutions to design learning pathways, 3) rethinking activities to focus on production and leadership, 4) supporting students to plan and fill learning portfolios, and 5) making learning open, public, and accessible to the community whenever possible. It also mentions the importance of digital writing and composition, using digital portfolios to showcase work, and examples like YouMedia and the Chicago Learning Network.
So here I am in a hotel room in Baltimore, Maryland, watching you all through the rectangle of my screen. As a teacher, I am much more used to being in the room. Pretty much all of my teaching has had a strong f2f component and a grounding in space/time, even if it also had online elements. (I imagine there are some of you there for whom this is not necessarily true.) So since I am taking this unusual (for me) position in this plenary, I thought I would take up the theme of five things from the outside looking in…
We start with a person. That person comes from a family; they live mostly the life of their community. They spend some variable amount of time interacting with media, passively or actively. That media, be it television/radio/or the computer-connected experience of interactive media, is highly likely to penetrate the home and become part of the initial experience of family and community life.
Eventually, we interact with a range of community-based activities like clubs and sports, and we interact with learning institutions: libraries, museums, and of course…schools
For all of us in those learning institutions, we are used to seeing people come in/go out. They walk a path through us. It is easy to see our ‘place’ at the center with so many footprints walking through. I know this is true for me.
We do mostly expect people to do their own connecting…
Of course, the internet and the web have changed (dramatically)the possibilities for connecting. From our internet connected computer or mobile device, we can ‘walk’ through and participate in learning experiences from around the globe. We can sample digital assets, we can engage in conversations and publish to anyone, anywhere.
The notion of connected learning, where people can leverage the affordances of the internet to help make connection, be it a personal learning network or whatever…is a powerful idea.But we can also let this powerful idea push us, in learning institutes, to explore a related powerful idea.
We can take the notion of connected learning to also mean connections between and among learning institutions. We can take seriously that each of our ‘places’ is one node on an individual’s learning network, and we can build and enhance our connections to make the paths between and among us more fruitful, more accessible, and more equitable.