This is a cross-post from the course discussion forum. For the past couple of days I’ve been reflecting on what the below experiences of learning signify for the larger context of K12 educational technology.

Anderson talks about learning being learner-, knowledge-, assessment- and community-centred.

The most learner-centered environments I’ve experienced have at one and the same time been the most solipsistic (or at least solitary), and the most social environments. They’ve both been within the wild, undisciplined, unplanned, decentralized, haphazard environment of the web itself.

Besides my MET courses, one of my primary learning experiences is just-in-time learning for just about anything, online. Wikipedia, online forums, help sites, you name it: they all have a place in learning. This is intensely self-directed, intensely focused, and requires strong information searching, retrieval, and processing skills. This is learner-centred, but it’s also knowledge-centred. Assessment is binary: did I find the information I needed to solve my problem. Community is involved, but only in the abstract sense that those who care to share their knowledge online build the overall repository that all of us can then access.

But another of my primary learning experiences is Twitter … connecting with smart, creative people who see and share interesting facts, theories, experiences, and resources. This is intensely social, usually very undirected and unfocused (unless you search or ask questions), and requires an ability to ignore irrelevancies and treat knowledge as a stream into which you will dip the occasional toe rather than a body of work that must be surveyed and mapped and conquered. This is a very community-centred learning.

Twitter and other social networking tools like it are potentially prototypes of learning sites that school districts and regions could create (easy to do with open source components) that would allow everyone in a school environment with expertise in anything share it with others – and benefit from others’ knowledge … all in real-time or near real time. It makes me wonder about a potential marriage of a Twitter with a Wikipedia … the ephemera of what knowledge individuals need now coupled with the relative longevity of increasingly accurate and better units of knowledge.

In fact, now that I think about it … I’m tempted to try to build such an animal!

Anderson, T. (2008). Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi, Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Athabasca University Press. Accessed June 11, 2009, from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008_Anderson-Online_Learning.pdf