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Friday, December 05, 2008

Themes Of

This month's big question - What Did You Learn about Learning 2008 is almost an annual tradition of asking people to look back on the year and provide some inkling of their aha moments. In reality it does an incredible job of surfacing the themes of each of the bloggers and give a sense of them. I'm hoping more people will take us up on this as I find it really surfaces some good stuff that I didn't quite recognize at the time.

Themes of:

Ken Allan
- takes us through his evolution of thinking about blogging and what his readers want. As you go through his posts, you can see how his thinking evolved. He also points us to a fantastic post that shows some core skills for getting into elearning.

Note to Ken - you should definitely look at my post - An Aha Moment - del.icio.us as Indicator of Valuable Content - Importantly My Content - it may give you another dimension beyond what people are reading and commenting on - what they save because they think it will be valuable again. For example, I just saved your getting into eLearning post because I think it will have value later and I think it should be surfaced to the Work Literacy community.

Michael Hanley - A Year in E-Learning: One Blog’s Progress - his top ten list gives a great sense of what he's been blogging about and his post gives a great summary of value of blogging:
Writing and maintaining a blog is one of the best motivators I know to continue developing my professional knowledge - to discuss the kind of topics I like to cover requires a comprehensive and in-depth of the subject of e-learning and all that understanding e-learning entails.
Clark Quinn - What did I learn about learning in 2008? pointed out mobile social which I'm certainly now using with my iPhone. This is different than what I think of when someone says mobile learning. But maybe that's wrong. He's causing me to rethink a bit of my take on mobile in 2008 2009.

But it's also great to just see perspectives and have a sense of someone through these posts. Somehow I feel like I know someone better having read the themes of Jeff Goldman - What I have Learned, Karyn Romeis - Oh dear, the dread annual question, Jason Allen - Nurtured Chaos.

4 comments:

Blogger In Middle-earth said...

Tenei to mihi ki a koe, Tony.

Thanks for the link and the advice - I have followed that through and will do more with it.

'His evolution of thinking' - I guess you could call it that. I'd be more inclined to describe it as an evolution of (my) learning, but that's just semantics on my part.

Sometimes, when I go on a learning journey, I find I go in a wide circle and come back to where I started. On these occasions, it is not uncommon for me, on reflection, to find that my first formed impressions were not far from reality.

There are those that would criticise this approach, saying that the reason I didn't find anything new was because I had a closed mind to start with.

It cuts both ways. Sometimes opening the eyes wider to see the vision doesn't give one any greater impression of what it's all about. I like to think that 'the journey' does more than just confirm first impressions.

Haere rā
from Middle-earth

Tony Karrer said...

Ken - fair point on wording. George Siemens the other day wondered via Twitter if he had ever changed his mind in the past few years. But he'd be the first to say he's learned a lot. So, interesting call on the wording.

On a different point, relative to your other comment - it was interesting for me to visit your year end post several months after I started reading you and we had some of these exchanges. Going back and looking at your posts were much more meaningful the second time around.

Maybe that partly answers my question of how to handle the issue of First Time vs. Readers Revisiting.

Fun conversation, this.

Blogger In Middle-earth said...

Aha Tony! This is interesting. More than just an aha moment. It has been my contention with students for decades now that a light once over, even if it's understood, is not always sufficient to get the true meaning from something.

I think it's a bit like listening to a song or piece of music for the first time (if you're into listening to music). The mind works in mysterious ways when it comes to understanding all that's there to be understood.

I have forced myself to revisit things, over the years, for that very reason. Okay, sometimes it's a waste of time. But one gets used to assessing whether something is worth another look.

We've had conversations about how the brain works before :-) But I believe that the brain gets primed, like the immune system does, when it first comes into contact with something new. It may not be understood first time round, but that doesn't mean that things haven't been lifted into cognition.

After all, and coming back to music, musicians practice a piece, and each time it's played, their minds have a better grip on how it should be rendered. I've heard mediocre musicians, who have practiced a piece well, play it superbly - through sheer practice.

Going back to the point - my idea of me blogging is not to record what I think, so much as to record how my thinking progresses. What I believed and posted about in June, may be quite different to the way I'd post about it today, for if my belief doesn't develop, I'm brain-dead Jim.

Catchya later

Tony Karrer said...

Ken - Great point about needing to revisit things in order to be ready to understand them. I'm starting to formulate some ideas on what I should do to make a better Blog / First Time Visitors Guide as well as what I should do in an on-going basis.