Today I took part in a small portion of a larger online/F2F event originating in Germany from LearnTec.
It was fun to trade ideas with Heike Philips, Dave Cormier and Jay Cross (and I am sorry Jennifer Jones was unable to chime in due to timing/home rhythms at the early time of day). We all were strong proponents of the value of conversation in learning (informal or otherwise) but I found myself backing off a bit and reminding myself that conversation is one of the three legs of my learning stool.
- Conversation – making meaning, getting different perspectives, trying out and testing ideas, challenging assumptions.
- Individual reflection – (because group reflection is a subset of conversation, no?) Stepping back, reviewing, observing, evaluating our own learning both in terms of process and content. Reflection provides us needed self awareness and the ideas we bring back into conversation.
- Reification – borrowing from Communities of Practice theory, what we create that expresses what we are learning or have learned. With internet tools makeing self publishing so easy, this area has blossomed – videos, images, blogs — things that manifest both our conversations and our reflections and put them out for wider consideration.
These three are a vortex, always intersecting with each other, even competing for our attention, eh? I wish I had paid more attention to reflection when I was younger. 😉
I have a habit of worshippping at the altar of conversation. But like all things, I must not let that blind me to other elements. It is in the interplay, the fluctuation between things, the margins, the tensions of what we know and don’t know, that learning happens.
A while ago I blogged about Scott McCloud’s 5 Card Nancy
