I was talking with Sarita last week and she was asking me to update a site I had made for her capstone course in 2018. The site is simple. It has information about Google sites, Weebly, and WordPress, essentially it is for some help for her capstone students eportfolios.
She asked me about how we might add content to it or the students’ websites that promoted lifelong learning. That’s a great question. How do we turn our websites into places that automatically update with useful and relevant information. And especially for students when they leave here what are the types of resources they can leave with? The work that was in their Canvas courses, is lost to them after a certain amount of time. How do we create a place of learning that we can take with us?
I mentioned a fellow named Harold Jarche. He is someone I have followed him for a long time, and he widely shares his notion of “Personal Knowledge Mastery.” For me, it is interesting to see how his model has been visible in my own work and the work of this learning community. We all began as educators who shared our learning and knowledge, then as a learning community with a common goal we created a wonderful space to work in, and we reached out and learned with others in the field.
Personal knowledge mastery is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. PKM keeps us afloat in a sea of information — guided by professional communities and buoyed by social networks.
And while I was talking with her, I thought of a website I had created back in Arizona. It was, like our OpenWeb site, rich with things to learn.
I think we have done a good job here on our website with resources for learners. In the YouTube video above on the website I created in Arizona, there was far more available. From the Faculty Focus articles to the posts by faculty to all the resources I and others on my team created, we had built a real fire hose of information. That’s not all bad, but I think maybe it’s more about the people than the stuff on the site.
Going forward, how do we leverage the people here and this website? I think short posts like this one can have impact some useful to the readers in our community. Particularly if we use them to have conversations around our own trials and tribulations.
What are the topics we might write about? What kinds of questions might we ask? My topic here was about creating a personal learning space. I used an example from earlier work I have done to a more recent event involving somebody I admire.
My question, how do we use this space or how do you use your own space to further your learning?
I went to Mastodon to see if you shared this using social media.
To me, this is the new challenge. Federating our posts across many platforms so more of our learning networks can interact with them.
I responded on another network 🙂
Just kidding. Or, I did, but…
In the video above there is a moment where you can see that we, as a team, had a Fb account and a bird account and you could subscribe via email. We were on multiple spaces, but man, where is the conversation? over there? Here? Both?
Good question and thank you for the reminder. Sharing is good.
Darn. I came back to this tab after a few days, wrote a comment, and got a “nonce verification” error message. Argggh.
I think the “sea of information” in the quote from Harold is apt, though its more than information, it’s all those spaces/places, federated or not, where people spread their thin attention budget. It’s harder and harder to draw them back to your island to sit on the beach together. I wish I had answers, but my old tricks are not working well anymore.
If anything your methods of both building this open space, external promoting but also the way you reach out directly to faculty on a one to one level is on target.
My dad used to utter an encouragement of “time, patience, and perseverance”
Wise dad.
I do think attention is the thing. With Annie Dillard’s passing, I suppose she was spot on with, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Of course these days it is not “days”, but minutes or seconds…
For me, I am just noticing/spending too much glassy rectangle and not enough flowers.
We will persevere. I believe.
And thank you for being here. You always remind me of who I am.