From the periphery--

creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by potomo

As much as I encourage sharing and contributing in the online communities in which I coach and lead-- understanding the potential of connected learning

As many times as I've shared this video from the Co-Learning Unit -- Obvious to You Amazing to Others

You'd think I'd be walking my talk
Especially with the unit on co-learning which I find compelling
And yet--- I've been on periphery-- reading--
Curating great nuggets of insight from the posts of others.

Knowing at this point that I'll never compose the epic post that has played out in my mind daily--

I'm opting for and committing to a number of shorter posts on co-learning to clarify my thinking so I'll have them to come back to.

With Howard Rheingold's definition of co learning,

In my definition, co-learning involves a re-orientation of each learner from purely individual acquisition of knowledge toward a process of sharing learning and sense-making with each other learner — peer-learning and peer-teaching at the same time. Co-learning also means that the teachers learn along with and from other learners in the same course.  

my mind went back to 2001 when I had the privilege of a year's planning for a new career pathway program for high schoolers wanting to become teachers.  A piece from Thomas Carroll profoundly influenced my thinking and was key in my designing (Carroll, T. G. (2000). If we didn't have the schools we have today, would we create the schools we have today? Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education [Online serial], 1 (1). Available: http://www.citejournal.org/vol1/iss1/currentissues/general/article1.htm ), particularly the images and excerpts quoted below.

Once we move the teacher—as an expert learner—into the learning activity we begin modeling the learning process with the students. They are all learning together. And as I have said, once we reach this point, it’s not useful to distinguish between students and teachers, because they are all learning. Who is teaching and who is learning? They are all learning.     Figure 4 helps us start thinking about everyone in this dynamic field as a learner.   I represent each individual with an “L” to indicate that they are learners, and that the role of each individual in this activity is learning.  We need to get rid of the circle and enable them to be learners in an open learning environment (see Figure 5).  One of the large “L’s” in the diagram is the expert learner, the more senior, experienced learner, the person we pay to continue to structure these learning activities, but the person who is also constantly learning more and modeling the learning process, as opposed to the teaching process.Once we have defined these individuals as learners, and once we have taken those boundaries away, we can actually add more learners to the equation.

I'm wondering how Carroll may have influenced the vision of #ccourses  -- if indeed others sense the connection. 

It's been an important one for me as I dig more deeply into the thinking of  #ccourses co-learners in the posts to follow.