I spent more time on this than I thought I would, but the endeavour led me down a couple of rabbit holes from which I am now emerging.
After reading through a portion of Dave Cormier’s Making the community the curriculum: A rhizomatic learning companion (n.d.), particularly WHY WE WORK TOGETHER – CHEATING AS LEARNING, MOVING YOUR TEACHING UP THE COLLABORATIVE CONTINUUM and FIVE TIPS FOR SLACKERS FOR KEEPING TRACK OF DIGITAL STUFF (which I am going to share with my students next term), I realized how important this assignment is to not only my professional life but to my understanding of the assignments for this course. My connections are important. Using a collaborative approach in my learning should not just be about the people in my cohort or team. It should also include my digital learning community as well. There is a wealth of knowledge there; use it!
In chapter 7, MOVING YOUR TEACHING UP THE COLLABORATIVE CONTINUUM, Cormier (n.d.) provides his definition of what he believes student-centred learning could look like and how much control teachers give up can determine how much control students can have over their own knowledge seeking and understanding. This led me to reflect upon my own learning, but also my teaching practices. How would I be able to encourage and support my students to become a rhizome for learning, similar to my map?
This brings me to my map; I have connections through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but I do not always utilize them for knowledge seeking or sharing. Only now having completed my map and taking a good hard look at my connections and what they could bring to me personally and professionally do I now have the capacity to see how my learning could take shape. I need to allow my students to do the same. Having them use each other, me, digital resources and their own digital presences to create, craft and shape their knowledge as they move through their own learning program, is how want my classroom to function.
Collaboration is on a spectrum, according to Cormier (n.d.), and along with my students, I can choose whether and how to be the least restrictive in their digital and analogue learning environments. How can I use these ideas in shaping how I learn? How can I use this information to better myself as an instructor? How do my connections in my map afford me the different avenues for information gathering? Why is this so important to me? Through this journey, I want to answer some of these questions.
In chapter 4, Cormier (n.d.) recommended understanding personal knowledge management as framed by Harold Jarche. According to Jarche (2020), in his Working Smarter Field Guide, because of the influx and abundance of information now available on the Internet, we have at our fingertips the ability to find, make sense of and share just about anything. He calls this seek –> sense –> share (Jarche, 2020). He goes on to explain that the digital connections we make can be utilized in a relatively systematic way. When we ‘seek’ information, it is important to use a feed aggregator, like feedly, carry a notebook or follow people whom you think would share important information (2020). To make sense of this new information he suggests to, “write a review, synthesize multiple perspectives, explain how some
new knowledge pertains to you or your profession” (Jarche, 2020, p. 9). Last, share your ideas and allow others to find them in their own time (2020). This framework is eye-opening for me because I had never thought about a digital environment or my map being a source of useful knowledge or information for me.
My map represents more than just a bunch of loose connections. It is a framework from which I can build my digital presence and identity, search for information, find academic and social/ emotional support and share what I have learned openly and transparently.
References
Cormier, D. (n.d.). Making the community the curriculum. Press Books.
Cover
Working Smarter. (2020). Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
https://jarche.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Working-Smarter-2020.pdf
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