The Xplanation

One of the blog posts I enjoy reading each week is Doug Belshaw’s Things I Learned This Week. Doug always lists a variety of interesting information and reflective items he has internalized over the last seven days.

As I was looking at his post this past weekend, it reminded me of something that often goes missing in our traditional approaches to education — reflection beyond and between the classroom container. As a teacher, I think I have been relatively effective over the years in terms of engaging my students to think about bigger questions and to reflect on how important issues impact their personal lives. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve been as successful at facilitating this kind of reflection and self-reflection beyond the confines of my own teaching and subject area and into other classes and arenas. In fact, I have often found that this kind of reflection is a little like teaching English composition skills to college freshmen — there is no guarantee that their performance on essays in those classes will transfer in any way to their History or Biology courses.

Now, obviously, there has been much work done in the academy on skill transfer and interdisciplinary thinking. But, one of the problems we face in formal education is necessarily structural — we create intentional silos designed to isolate content areas and the study of those. While creating those silos is relatively simple, training ourselves and others to think and communicate beyond and between those silos is more difficult.

This compartmentalized approach to learning stands in direct contrast, of course, with real life. In the real world, learning is open and happens through formal and informal networks. It occurs through a combination of experience, community, study, and reflection. I think Harold Jarche’s recent image on Personal Knowledge Management does a good job of showing how some of this happens.

All of this is simply my way of explaining why I appreciate posts like the ones Doug Belshaw creates each week. They make me reflect on both personal and professional levels about how I continue to grow. And, with that in mind, here are a few things that I have learned or have been reflecting on in the past few days.

• The effect recording audio at 44.1 kHz as opposed to 48 kHz can have on syncing audio and video tracks
• The best ways to link the informal and formal learning worlds of students without compromising or ruining either
• How to explain why I think we need new learning platforms
• HTML5 and video
• ePub XML formats and the ideal extensions for new types of e-books
• My need to listen more carefully and let others know I have heard and understood them

This is just a smattering of what I have been processing, and much of it has happened across multiple projects and groups. It has also crossed over from work to personal and back again. I think that’s what real learning looks like, and it’s what I continue to work on capturing in product design around learning.