So we’re in beautiful but foggy Monterey for the Internet @ Schools West conference where I’ll be doing some blogvangelism tomorrow morning before heading back East. Somehow I managed to get my jet-lagged rear end through the 10K Big Sur River Run yesterday morning through a beautiful redwood forest. I’m paying for it today, however.

But here’s the quote of the day, overheard in a restaurant: “You know, if you’re lucky, you’ll get one good teacher in your life.”
And there were general assents at the table where the comment was made. And it started me thinking about my own teachers, and how many of them I really remember as having an impact on my desire to learn. There were three, at least in my traditional schooling. I guess I’m lucky. But it also got me thinking about my own teaching, and the thousands of kids I had in my classrooms, and how many of them I left an impact on, not in terms of journalism or media or literature but in terms of loving learning. I wonder…

And it also got me thinking about how many teachers I have now who constantly help me learn. Many more today than in all of my past.

Here is a presentation in Articulate from George Siemens that lays out his theory of connectivism and how it applies to the Read/Write Web. Much of what he says makes sense, I think. We need to start looking at learning much differently in a socially networked world. For instance, now that we have access to people and knowledge, learning is “network creation” and that we can learn through “collaborative meaning making.” And the idea the we no longer need to learn everything in “advance of need” resonates strongly with Brown and Hagel’s idea of push vs. pull learning, that we can pull information from a source when we need it, not have it pushed upon us in case we need it.

No doubt, these are some disruptive ideas for educators, which is why we need to consider them. The more I listen and read and learn from all of these new teachers, the more much of this seems to come into focus. But it also begs many new questions. What content to we still need to push? What are those core ideas that every child needs to consider? How do we teach ourselves to teach our students the skills they need to find and build their own networks for learning?
—–