It was posted as the introduction to Learn Camp, a self-directed learning programme from the Central Ohio ASTD chapter that aims to let learners explore some of the new digital tools that are changing access to information and ways of learning today. The activity along with this, labelled ‘discovery exercise’, was simply to share your thoughts about which habit is easiest for you, and which is the hardest, plus any thoughts you might have about lifelong learning in general.
Looking at the 7 1/2 habits, I identify, more or less, with all 7 of them. What I have difficulty with is the fraction on the end, that is to say, play. Not that I’m particularly serious, or a kill-joy, it’s just that I don’t seem overly inclined to play, idly fiddling around with things. For me, exploration, akin to travel or journeying, better encapsulates the end fractional habit of lifelong learning more than playing. That is, finding out what’s next or over the horizon, finding out how things are connected and what it means, not just to me but to others too. Because I don’t identify greatly with the playing metaphor might be one of the reasons that I’m not particularly inclined towards the current trend in digital learning for ‘makes’. Oh well, we can’t all be the same.
An article entitled “How to Become a Successful Lifelong Learner” was also signposted by LearnCamp. I’m glad this article was flagged up because it served to remind me of the importance of goal setting within lifelong learning, and most importantly to write those goals down. If I’d written my goals down in the past, maybe my odyssey to learn Spanish might not have taken a nose dive in the last year or two š
All in all, a useful little activity.
Post script: subsequent to posting this, I’ve been thinking about the definition, or the meanings, of the word play. In his list of participatory skills, Jenkins identifies play as, “the capacity to experiment with and explore your surroundings as a form of problem-solving”. The role of exploration within play, together with experimentation and performance (testing roles and identities in different settings), has long been established (Huizinga 1950; Bruner et al. 1976 and Gagne 1985). However, nowadays, play can equally be seen as simulation, or as Garvey (1990) suggests, wilfing (what was I looking for). Indeed, in today’s intensely interconnected world, wilfing has the potential to be highly productive given that the discovery of knowledge is often little more than a few clicks away.
I suppose I’ve learnt that play is an important habit of lifelong learning, and that it has a number of forms; each to their own, just so long as you acquire the habit š
In Week 4, the fundamental question that #ocTEL asks is āhow can we take advantage of technological developments in order to create and source relevant learning resources?ā Actually, the question continues āfor our studentsā, but Iām going to ignore that bit. Iām just going to throw in here the idea of āself-organised learningā and, on the very same subject, quote Steve Wheeler in his blogpost today, when he refers to āthe ability of the learners themselves to direct their own learning, and to be able to call upon the resources they need, when they need themā, before I move on to relate how Iāve engaged with the question and with this weekās activities.
The first activity was about finding and reviewing resources and,Ā in terms of ease of use and usefulness, comparing a number of resource repositories. The repositories were split into two camps: āofficialā ones, such asĀ Jorum andĀ Merlot, and āopenā ones like YouTube, TED and iTunesU. I have to say that I was disinclined to do this activity as Iāve done it before. Itās so time consuming, and never mind that it seems to smack of either desperation or wild anticipation akin to a lucky dip. However, I was interested to read Imogen Bertinās post in the forum āiTunesU ā you need to learn how to search itā¦ā. Interesting, as having undertaken a detailed review and comparison of the repositories, Imogen reports over all lukewarm enthusiasm for the āofficialā repositories both in terms of their search function and in terms of the resources found. However, the āopenā repositories fare somewhat better, especially iTunesU. Imogen says,
if you know how to search it, then itās actually very good. […] there is a rake of useful stuff on there, lots of it free, but how to search isnāt obvious at all.
And on that score, Imogen kindly enlightens us.
iTunesU. You need to learn how to search it.
She also declares that āYouTube rocks!ā, and attributes this to its great search engine.
Itās an excellent post, with a great follow up conversation, but my point is this: with the likelihood of such patchy results, why bother to go looking for such content in the first place. Wouldnāt it be handier to have a filtering system in place whereby relevant resources come to you. I mean, why not harness the power of your personal learning network [PLN]?
When a member of my PLN posts a link to a potentially handy resource, I bookmark it in the hope that itāll be useful to me at a later stage. This way Iāve started to develop my own database of searchable resources. It means Iām not starting a search from scratch as I already have a bank of resources, resources that to some degree have been vetted by my peers. This is how IāveĀ found a number of great resources recently. Just for the record, I searched iTunesU with the term “digital literacies”, and what do you know, it came up with the exact same resources that I already have bookmarked, plus one! So thanks, Imogen for bringing this to attention. š
A further activity this week related to creating you own materials. You were asked to choose a tool with which you’re not already familiar and consider its application in your context. A number of suggestions were offered for review:
and the following questions were amongst those provided as prompts:
How easy was it to understand how this tool worked?
How quickly and easily would you find it to use?
In terms of context, I paddle my own canoe. I’m an individual (tutor, facilitator, guide, learner…) who simply wants to develop online learning resources that add interest and stimulate interaction with the learning experience. Consequently, I need “low-threshold, low-barrier” technologies that are easily learned and easily accomplish my teaching and/or learning objectives, and more often than not, have sharing and collaboration featuresĀ built-in to them.
With this criteria in mind, I took a look over the suggested tools. Straight off, Xerte failed to grab me because it didn’t actually tell me what it did. It opened with “Welcome to the Xerte Project”, whatever that is, and went on to tell me that:
Xerte Online Toolkits is an award winning suite of browser-based tools that allow anyone with a web browser to create interactive learning materials quickly and easily. Content can be delivered to all devices using standards compliant HTML5
Err, I’m sorry, I just want to know what the tool does. Can I design a quiz, record audio, make a video or animate a scenario etc? I didn’t appreciate all the technical terminology either. Therefore, at this stage, I’m not inclined to investigate Xerte any further, despite enthusiastic recommendations in the “what people are saying…” section of the website. Glomaker and Cmap fared similar fates with me I’m afraid. However, Camtasia, Jing and Screen-o-matic were more the sort of tools I’d be looking for, and pretty much said what they did on the tin, so to speak:
Enhance Your Online Conversations With Jing.
Jing gives you the basic tools to start sharing images and short videos of your computer screen.
Capture What You See
Record What You Do
Quick & Easy Sharing
The tools I require need to be intuitive and easy to take up in the first instance, maybe with the option of progressing to more advanced capabilities over time. In fact, I just recently used Screencast-o-matic to produce a presentation for another course I’ve been taking, andĀ I found it to be very straight forward and easy to use. I can certainly recommend it. Co-incidentally, the presentation was on the topic of personal learning networks and how developing a PLN has helped me learn and make progress towards my learning goals. I’ll provide the link here, in case anyone would care to take a look.
