The next reading I had to look at was Thomas and Brown’s Arc-of-Life learning from A new culture of learning. Cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. The question I have to address is:
How does Thomas and Brown’s ‘new culture of learning’ reflect your own experiences as an educator and learner in the past two-three years? Identify those aspects that are similar, and those aspects that are different?
The key ideas that stemmed from this reading for me personally were that learning is happening everywhere. That it has changed from the stable infrastructure of the 20th Century and is now much more fluid. It is constantly being created as a response to change. We have access to near unlimited resources but also have the ability to connect with others at the same time. Many examples given in the reading do just that. They have been cultivating minds, seeing other students as resources and have been figuring out how to learn from each other. As such there is now a bridge between two worlds: the public and information based and the personal and structured. It was the connection between personal motivation and resources that led people to cultivate their imaginations and recreate the learning space in a new way.
In thinking about my own learning journey in relation to this, I think I was doing this earlier than two or three years ago. If anything I have been in a stale mate these past few years. As far back as 8 years ago was when I think I started doing things like what was mentioned above. When I signed up for the Edublogs Teacher Challenge. I was craving connection with other educators as I was the only one in my school teaching my subject area. It was through the establishment of my first blog and making connections on Twitter that I developed my confidence as a voice for drama and theatre education. I did question my immersion in it at one point however. The boundaries between work and personal time became very blurred and it started not to sit well with me as I wanted to make a distinction between the two. I still do in some ways but I appreciate that much of the professional development I need will require me to go out and look for this myself as schools are just too time and fiscally pressured to be able to give you time to learn new things. In some ways, I think it is through PLNs that you develop far better as a professional anyway because you are learning from others who are just like you.
