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We Are All Self-Directed Learners Now

We are experiencing a renaissance of information and ideas with our country’s leading educational institutions like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford offering Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).  The introduction of Apple’s iPad released April 3, 2010, has ushered in new era of popular interest in the quality of software development in all sectors of life, including for teaching and learning. Emerging technologies are impacting the role of the teacher, the role of schools and the role of libraries. Some have theorized that emerging technologies are changing learning itself, spurring cognitive development by means of pushing us to use multiple parts of our brains to process and synthesize images, audio, and textual information critically and effectively.  The digital age is producing information in various formats at an exponential rate that is almost impossible to grasp. The challenge of this is both daunting and exciting. The implications of the digital age and globalization in the areas of teaching, learning, and scholarship are as of yet unknown.

Exploring emerging technologies and leveraging them to support our students and learning goals is a uniquely individual process. We are all looking to develop our best classroom workflow and to create our own micro ecosystem of effective tools. Part of the process is to identify the teaching methodologies that best match our natural style and that can be used both for establishing ritual and creating variety in the learning experiences that we design and create in our classrooms. We need everyone engaged and willing to take ownership for the next generation of emerging teaching practices. How do we balance fostering creativity and innovation, which require experimentation and freedom, with fostering rigor and scholarship, which often require standardization and disciplined study? To be clear, I do not think that we should abandon all traditional models of teaching and learning, but rather we need to actively ponder and examine how we can use emerging technologies to enhance learning and ultimately, to play an active role in the transformation of instructional approaches to create new models of inquiry, teaching, and learning. Also, we need to actively search out opportunities to effectively sustain our own motivation and effort on this quest. We need all teachers to be teacher-leaders and to engage in creating their own self-directed learning journeys.

Here are a few ways to begin your self-directed learning journey:

This list is not meant to be exhaustive or prescriptive, but simply to be a place to start. Make learning happen your way on your own time. Enlist a colleague. It will be a more powerful and lasting experience. Please share the ways that you have engaged in your own self-directed learning journey.

 

About the Author:

Wendy Cotta is the Director of Technology Integration at Worcester Academy in Worcester, MA. She earned a M.Ed. in Technology in Education from Lesley University in 2002. She worked as a public high school Spanish teacher for 10 years. She has spent the last 6 years in private schools, supporting teachers with the integration of technology. On Twitter, she is @edtech2innovate.