The Connected Educator: Chapter 1

The Connected Educator 

Chapter 1 

“Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads.”  --Herman Melville

• “Theories of social learning--the learning that occurs within a social context such as school-based learning communities, online networks, or serendipitous connection--suggest that people learn best from one another.” (p.25)

Do-It-Yourself Learning

• “Technology offers constant opportunities for self-directed and self-selected learning.  Educators--through connections with each other, new research, and continually evolving content--have opportunities to interact, reflect, and focus without controls by experts.” (p34)

I appreciate how this self-directed, “do-it-yourself” attitude toward learning and technology begins.  Individuals initially connect to diverse communities where they begin to understand, knowingly or unknowingly, “How they best learn.” As learners connect deeper they become better at finding the communities that learn, create and express in ways that best extend their learning and interconnectedness.

• “Connected Learning is learning through relationships” (P65)

A shift in my own perceptions as a “do-it-yourself” learner happened in a way that has adjusted my ability to learn.  I have always referred to my self as, “Not being a reader.  I do not like to read as it is hard for me.  The idea of sitting and reading makes me feel like I am not accomplishing anything.  Terry, a friend who is the head of the Literacy Department at URI, said that I was a reader.  She said that, “You are constantly reading--magazines, professional journals, reports, texts, emails.  You do not like to read for fun, but you are reading all the time.”  I now preface, "I do not like to read." with, “Unless it has pictures.....” 

This created slight shift in my own perceptions of what learning is and from where it comes.  My idea of what reading was, was linked to leisure reading.  I maintained a misguided devaluing of the learning that comes from technical reading and “informational text,” which ironically is now a major aspect of the new English Common Core Standards.