Week 7 Reflection

1. What resources/ideas did I share this week?  This week I used resources from the text, A New Culture of Learning, as well as a blog post by another educator regarding teachers who choose to join the collective or remain isolated.  I also shared an interesting article that was not education specific, but spoke to the idea that as a society, our participation in collectives is making us smarter, due to the increased amount of content we are producing, rather than simply consuming.

2. What did I intend to be the impact of my resources on others' learning?  By sharing these resources, and reflecting on my own participation in collectives, I hoped to show how impactful this participation can be - as it has on my own career.  Since I began this participation, I have been more motivated in my own career and learning than at any other time.  I am going in new directions that I could not have anticipated even five years ago, and would never have gone had I not done this.  The impact on me has been huge, and I wanted others to know how powerful this is.

3. What actual impact could I discern? Based on the comments I received, I think that many in this class are experiencing different phases of this same growth that I have over the past few years.  Not many are untouched by this.

4. What will I do differently next week?  I will continue to look for resources that expand my thinking, even as I reflect on my own learning.  It seems there is a lot of reflection going on out in the blogosphere and other places where people are summing up this shift in how we work, play, and learn. It verifies my own gut feelings about this shift, and also helps me to learn about new ways people are interacting online.

5. What resources did others share that made a difference in my learning? Jonathan shared a link to BSSD's open content curriculum, which I was really happy that he shared! They have been doing an interesting re-make of their curriculum over the past couple of years, and it is great to have it as a resource as we work through the same process. Ginger put up an excellent post, which made me think about some of the "forced" groupings we are often put into - people expect magic to happen just because we have been told to collaborate and we all presumably have the same goals, but these rarely elicit the kind of true innovative thinking that our chosen collectives do.  How can we get teachers to collaborate, and yet not force these kinds of situations upon them?