cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Jonas Maaløe Jespersen
As I was sitting in a workshop, the presenter referenced a Seth Godin blog post.
My instinct? Google the post, read the link, and tweet it out and share it with others.
The instinct of the person beside me? Write down the link in a notebook, and (perhaps) go look at it later.
My mind was blown by the process and it made me do a lot of thinking.
First of all, how do we get kids to explore their own learning in deeper ways if they don’t have access to all of the information the Internet provides. That being said, it also made me think about is it better to have that immediate access?
When I brought this up in my workshop, I asked one person that was writing notes in her notebook on what she was going to do with them. She looked at me as if she was “caught” and said, “probably nothing.” I, like so many others, have done that exact same thing. Write down a ton of stuff that a presenter says in a book, only to never look at it again. Do our kids often do the same?
What I challenged the group to do was to create or openly reflect on what they have learned. I think that I would rather have someone listen to me for 20 minutes and write a blog post about what they learned then to simply listen to me an hour, write it down in a notebook, and never do anything with it. I think content is important, but it is what you do with that content that really leads to learning.
So why openly reflect? If I had a 100 people in a room, that all did this, and they just chose to read posts from five others, how much would their own learning improve? What other ideas would it lead to? I think a ton.
Ultimately this has nothing to do with whether I had easy access to the post (although it did help tremendously), but what I do with what I write down. Does it matter if I started in a notebook? Probably not, but the access to so many opportunities to create something and connect learning does have advantages.
What do you think?
