Call me crazy, but one of the things I enjoy most on a Saturday morning is surfing the world through my iPad. On my mail, I can find my weekly digests from The New York Times, Education World, my favorite Yahoo groups, and Twitter. After browsing through the digests and reading some of the suggested articles, I’ll make my way over to my Pulse app and browse through my favorite blogs. Then I surf through Facebook, and if I have time, I’ll take a look through Google+.
My iPad has been a life-saver for me. It has opened up my world in ways that a desktop computer was never able to. While I do occasionally use my iPad to read books, to watch videos, or to play games, more than anything else, I use my iPad to connect with the world.
Those connections were life-saving to me when my daughter was diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of 10 and I was desperate for answers. What caused it? Why were her seizures so different from the typical “grand mal” seizure? How could a perfectly healthy child suddenly, over a three-week time period, go from having no seizures to seizures every two hours? Which doctors should we go to? What are the side effects of the medicines that suddenly had to take? I had so many questions and knew nothing about this new world that I had been thrust into. Years back, when I was a child, if my mother had been in a similar situation, she would have found her way to the library and spent time researching. But now, my world is different. I hopped on the Internet. I discovered that Yahoo had several groups centering around epilepsy. I joined them, and through them began finding answers to some of my questions, developing even more questions, and finding answers to those too, or ideas for other places to go to find the answers. I joined an online group called Hope for Hypothalamic Hamartomas which allowed me to connect with people from all over the world about a rare condition that causes the type of seizures my daughter was having. And although my daughter’s epilepsy is now under control, I still continue to participate in those communities and share the knowledge that I have gained over the past couple of years.
Conlan, Grabowski and Smith (2003) state that “In 1999, more than 95% of adults participated in self-directed learning. Typical learners spend an average of 15 hours per week on a self-directed learning project” (p. 10) I can definitely count myself as part of that 95%, and, before beginning graduate school at Walden University, I would say that I definitely did spend at least 15 hours a week on self-directed learning. I’ve used connections that I’ve made through the Internet to learn about my older daughter’s Asperger’s syndrome, to learn about healthier living, to learn about alternative forms of heating a house, and, most recently, to learn about my new car – the Chevy Volt. The connections that I have formed over the Internet have not only answered my initial questions, but often have created new questions within me, which usually lead to new paths of inquiry, a process that one of my Walden colleagues calls “snowballing” (Hagood, 2013).
The most important learning that I have participated in through the Internet connections I have made centers around education and technology, two of my biggest passions. I use Twitter to connect with people whose ideas, thoughts and suggestions I admire, such as Larry Ferlazzo, Pam Moran, and Wesley Fryer, and to connect with organizations and on-line papers, such as Edutopia, the Writing Project, and The New Yorker. I read tweets that interest me, occasionally respond to some, and tweet interesting ideas and articles to those people who follow me. I belong to several Diigo groups: Diigo in Education, iPad for Education, and the HC English Department group. Through these groups, I can link to interesting articles or websites and share those that I find interesting with others. I also have some Diigo groups for my students that are used for the same purposes. I belong to several communities on Google+, Facebook, EdWeb and Ning. In addition, using an app on my iPad called Pulse, I connect to a number of blogs, some based on personal interests and some based on professional interests. All of them have contributed to my learning in some way. Finally, a large part of my personal learning comes from the on-line newspapers that I read. And while my daily digest of The New York Times brings me to articles that I find most interesting, where most of my learning occurs is from other readers’ responses to the articles. Unlike some other newspapers, the responses to articles in the New York Times are generally well-written, very thoughtful, and quite educational. They generally force me to look at the many sides to the issues that are being presented in the newspapers. This is something that was rarely possible before Web 2.0 opened up the world to us.
I do have to admit that, for the most part, I am a lurker – one of those people who spends a lot of time reading, but not much time participating. However, this is not a bad thing. Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989), in the article “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning” say that “An intriguing role in learning is played by ‘legitimate peripheral participation,’ whereby people who are not directly taking part in a particular activity learn a great deal from their legitimate position on the periphery….It is a mistake to think that important discourse in learning is always direct and declarative. This peripheral participation is particularly important for people entering the culture. They need to observe how qualified practitioners behave and talk to get a sense of how expertise is manifest in conversation and other activities” (p. 26). I have definitely found in my own experiences that I must lurk for a long time before I am comfortable enough with my new knowledge that I can begin participating and sharing my knowledge with others. And while I have heard some people say that to be a truly connected learner, you must be participating by posting your own thoughts and ideas, that doesn’t matter to me. I do post when I have something to share, and maybe one day I will be a very active tweeter or blogger. But for now, what matters to me, more than anything, is that every day I have the opportunity to connect with people outside of my daily face-to-face world. I can connect to people who live in very different places and who have had very different experiences, and to people who are going through the same thing that I am going through. I cannot imagine learning without them.
References:
Brown, J.S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42.
Conlan, J., Grabowski, S., & Smith, K. (2003). Adult learning. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Adult_Learning
Hagood, A. (2013). [Discussion board post]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_3469735_1%26url%3D.
Where My Mind Wanders 