Full Circle Associates

Sandra shares a collaborative visualization created by a learning community to express what it "looked like" to them.
What does an Elearning Community look like? Sandra wrote:

...This image was constructed synchronously and collaboratively by a cohort of online learners — and well nigh ‘furiously’ I might add. Along with the Chat running below the whiteboard image - running so fast and so far to the right that you couldn’t keep up.

The starter image presented was the intersecting circles inside the box. Representing the interaction among ‘course’ content, other learners, external resources, etc. Clearly - the elearners are saying most of the learning takes place outside the box. Most of the learning takes place is unstructured ways. The learning process goes back and forth among content, other learners, external resources along unpredictable, often frustrating, definitely nonlinear pathways. Learning one thing leads to another question leads to another learning…and sometimes to something concrete you can put in another box.

I’ve shared this image with a few other people - they don’t even think its interesting, let alone feel the powerful emotions and insights expressed in this imaage. Now that its static and preserved - so much of what it really means is gone - and we can only get that back if/when we do it again. When we got done making this picture — I absolutely had to preserve it — I was on such a euphoric high over what we had just made together.

It is hard to describe these experiences to people who have not experienced them. Pictures, words -- none of them really capture that feeling of flow. People who have not experienced it will tell me it is not possible. In working with groups interested in starting and supporting communities of practice, there will always come this moment when they talk in ernest about how things really start happening once people come face to face.

In this global world, that face to face is the option of the priveledged unless we work exclusively at the local level. As always, I do NOT denigrate the value of face time. I treasure it. But that does not mean we should abandon home that we cannot experience the flow of truly being "with" people if we cannot be F2F.

It is possible. OK, I'll step off my soap box.

See, I warned you I had a big backlog of posts.