Meadow

You never quite know what will pop up.

Wild flowers scatter seeds around the meadow.

Some are carried by animals others by the wind...

A little while later, you discover that some of them have fallen in fertile ground.

As you study the different species and take soil samples, note the season, the humidity, you start to see patterns.

What is apparently chaotic, haphazard, is not.

Chaos has order...of sorts.

If learning is a mechanism (a word which I think is inapplicable to the natural world) then this is how it can be observed.


I have witnessed some examples over the past few days.

I asked my students to create tutorial videos last year.

One of the students, Maxence http://cordomac.blogspot.fr made a rock-climbing video with his friend Romain.

It suddenly and quite unexpectedly popped up in a Twitter conversation between somebody in Australia and someone in France.

@MichelleOckers @sensor63 @cordo_mac did one nice https://t.co/IcIcGmDmbK I learned something, never too late :)

— Bruno Winck (@brunowinck) November 15, 2015

That work which had been done a year before suddenly had popped up.

A conversation with an ex-student the year before had led to him coming to participate in class. I have learnt to capture instants so that others may benefit from them at another moment.

I videoed a conversation in French.

As I had the video, I posted it into a a document for students in the Sports Management class.  Now most people would say that if you want people to make progress in English you only have documents in English. Counterintuitively the French video sparked English writing.

Here, in Sylvain's blog http://sylvainben.blogspot.fr/2015/11/the-diversity-of-job-opportunities-in.html, he responds to the video which captured his attention his reflection written in English.

I comment on the blog, giving him the link to the video, now on Youtube, to enable him to reflect on using diversified media in his blog. His blog added to the video, enriched by comments by myself and Bruno Winck now becomes a powerful tool to demonstrate a simple principle.

What counts for me, is not 'content' per se, but people who share personal or personally sourced resources with others

A book as Dave Cormier would say is a stupid person who can no longer interact. 

Appropriately, unexpectedly the concept of rhizomatic learning pops up here.

Learning in open networks is messy and challenging.

Learners need to develop 'crap detection' skills

Learners need to understand the importance of networking with people to find mentors and experts and friends.

Learners need to learn the importance of sharing their work.

Learners need to learn how to curate.

I found a student, Huseyin who blogged on the question of information overload.
https://huseyinaydinblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/16/day-1-wolweekchallenge/


I can see now what the next classes will include...