A link from Stephen Downes led me to this wonderful post by Tom Haskins, which begins:
There’s informal learning happening inside my blog readerI All these bloggers I subscribe to appear to be learning without formal instruction. No one is showing signs of rote learning, acquiring books smarts without street smarts, or regurgitating a repository of useless facts. All these bloggers are self directing their own learning proceses, motivating their own progress, synthesizing their own meaning and constructing idiosyncratic mental models.
How did all these bloggers get so resourceful and practiced at learning informally from the blogging they are doing? Was there a workshop or webinar I missed on how grow and change from blogging? Is there a sim where the branched story guides the learner to make the right learning choices? Are all these bloggers learning informally (from reading, writing, linking, subscribing, deleting, quoting and getting quoted) without being taught how to do that? Aren’t they (and me) in danger of making costly mistakes to have taught themselves how to learn from blogging?
Tom’s next post talks about winning the informal learning game.
You make progress in the game when you notice how much you know that you taught yourself. You win when you realize the only way you could know anything is to have incorporated it into your “idiosyncratic mental model”. If you didn’t mess with it’s meaning, use, or connections to other insights, you spaced it out. If you can recall it, you took it from where you got it and made it into your own understanding: informally, uniquely, usefully.
1 comment so far ↓
Thanks Jay!
Leave a Comment