I found this map of Ray Sims’ personal learning environment via a link from Stephen Downes (thanks, Stephen!). It’s a neat idea. I’m guessing that it would be pretty informative to ask K-12 teachers and administrators to diagram their own personal learning environments and then have some discussion around some key questions:
- What sources do we tap into for our own professional learning?
- What overlaps are there between staff members?
- What gaps are there within our school organization (i.e., what learning channels should we be monitoring but aren’t)?
- What are some strategies for staying on top of the incredible wealth of information that is out there?
- How do we learn about new learning channels?
- How are we modeling ‘lifelong learning’ for our students?
- and so on…
This is cool. I may try to create my own map and see what it looks like. How about you? What does your personal learning environment look like?
Unfortunately, I don’t need a map to know where some gaps are at my site, sigh. I like this idea, and will likely do my own over break.
FYI, there are two online mind mapping products (free) for those out there who don’t have Visio or Inspiration:
http://bubbl.us/ (supposed to be able to interact collaboratively–had some trouble with that when we tried it on Ed Tech Weekly)
http://mindomo.com/ (Needs to be loaded on desktop)
Happy Sunday!
Gwynne: thanks for the pick-up. I like your questions. I had similar thought of making this an assignment within a course (in my case in the corporate setting); however, I haven’t pursued that yet. I’m tagging your post as a reference for if I do get back to that thought someday.
Prompted by previous comment:
– The map was created using View Your Mind (http://www.insilmaril.de/vym/ ), free and open source; however, Linux only.
– A good resource for mindmapping tools and techniques is:
http://www.innovationtools.com/resources/mindmapping.asp
– The wikipedia page is also good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mind_Mapping_software
Ray
Great idea…I will be doing this now for myself after this weekend’s conference.
It also got us thinking about how we can map students’ learning of 21st century learning skills K-12 so that we can better articulate and integrate this into their schooling.
Love it!