home

=**Taking Stock--How Far Have You Come?**=

//The goal of Powerful Learning Practice has been to help contextualize some of the changes that are happening due to social Web technologies and to get us all a little bit further down the proverbial road in terms of the uses of these tools in our own practice. Now that we're at the end of our work together, it's time to take stock in terms of how much our own understanding and practice reflects the skills and literacies that our students will have to master. How far have you come?

Here are some of the areas to think about in terms of your own practice and your understanding of the pedagogies required to prepare our kids://

1. **Collaboration**-- Our students are going to need to work with other people in ways that "achieve collective results that the participants would be incapable of accomplishing working alone." ([|Dave Pollard]) It's much more than coordinaton or cooperation. It requires "co-creation."

How are you collaborating, co-creating right now? How can you model this for your students?

2. "**Publish then Filter**"-- Clay Shirky in "[|Here Comes Everybody]" discuss this idea that much of what we read right now has not been edited in the traditional format. This demands that we become active, not passive, readers of information.

How good are you at being the editor? How do you find truth? How actively do you participate in the way you consume information?

3. **Nomadic, "Passion-Based", Individualized Learning**-- The linear curriculum is no longer the only way people learn. When knowledge is everywhere and when potential teachers or co-learners are available, we must know how to build our own learning curriculum, our own texts, our own classrooms. Instead of an industrial model, we need an agricultural model, moving away from standardization to individualization. (Sir Ken Robinson)

How would you go about creating a "classroom" and curriculum for your passion? (RSS) How can you help your students?

4. **Transparency**-- In a "pervasively proximate, ubiquitously connected" ([|Mark Federman]) world, we will compete in large measure by the portfolio we create for ourselves online. As they grow older, much more of our children's lives will be online, necessarily so. Being able to publish and being able to shape what we publish into an online portfolio is a new literacy.

How are you becoming more transparent? How do you publish? How are you able to model being [|Googleable] for your students? When your students' parents Google your name, what do they find? What do they expect to find, do you think?

5. **Continuous/Connective Learning**-- More and more, learning occurs on demand, anytime, anyplace. Learning is a process, not an event. And it is dependent on the connections that we have and the network we have behind us. ([|George Siemens])

What does your network look like? How do you go about adding dots (nodes) to your network map? How do we balance continuous learning environments with the other essential parts of our lives?

6. **Paperless**-- The world that our kids enter is going to be more digital, more linked, more shared, all because they will have moved away from paper and into digital environments.

How much are you "paper trained" right now? How can you begin to wean yourself off of paper to do your business (so to speak) in linked, online, collaborative environments?

7. **From Information to People**-- It's not so much what we know, but who we know these days. Our students will need to be skilled at finding the answers to their questions when they need them. Therefore, they must also be skilled and knowing how to find people or resources who can help them in that quest.

Who are your teachers? How do you find new teachers? How can you help your students find their own teachers?

Resources: [|The Knowledge Works Foundation]