Love2Learn

I’ve said time and time again that learning is a journey and blogging about it helps not just for documentation purposes, but with a growing community, actually challenges and supports. Can I describe it in a way that would facilitate someone to not only understand but also do something similar (sometimes we call these processes as meta-cognition and teaching, respectively)?

Why is it important to ask this question in the first place? Looking at learning as a process is a good learning strategy, quite often because the process is more transferrable than the content, e.g. mathematical thinking viz-a-viz maths curriculum.

I digress….

Today, I was fortunate enough to stumble on @Veritasium’s post on the effectiveness of videos – which is interesting in itself and worthy of a reactive post (in the meantime, I did tweet about the veritasium site). I mention it here now merely as attribution for leading me on to a 2011 TED talk by Sarah Kay – If I should have a daughter.

There’s much to glean from this video like being a mother, story-telling and connecting – she’s got a wonderful way with words. Truth be told, I struggle to focus on this one thing about learning journeys. Sarah started and ended with powerful renditions of two spoken word poetry : B and Hiroshima. In between these, she described her journey to being a spoken word poet as involving 3 crucial steps (yes, it’s a list):

1. I can
2. I will
3. I continue to grow, taking what I know already to help me make sense of that which I don’t yet understand. She goes on to say that this is not an end because it’s a constant evolution.

Simple. Powerful. True.

If I were to describe any sort of real learning on my part – including my blogging journey – these 3 steps fit the bill. I would be happy to use this model to describe my journey and, in the work that I do helping teachers integrate technology, facilitate teaching and learning.

For those who prefer nouns to verbs, here’s a parallel list (my interpretation):

1. Self-belief
2. Decision or Choice
3. Growth (others like to call this lifelong learning)

This is how I describe mine – thanks to Sarah. Does this make sense? Do you have another way?

Tags: blogging, learning strategies, teaching

This entry was posted on Monday, March 21st, 2011 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Education, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.