Me as student

The Masters degree that I am completing includes a subject called "Networked and Global Learning" (NGL). This subject is designed to encourage students to become autonomous learners who are actively engaged within a global community. Through immersing themselves in an on-line environment, and acquiring the skills to use a variety of tools that encourage interconnection, students become networked in an on-line community, where they not only share their ideas but also learn from others and continue to grow their craft.

Through my perception so far, networked and global learning creates the conditions that lead to productive learning, such as enabling learners to join networks that can provide them with the information they may use to further develop, regardless of their field or purpose. This is referred to as joining "communities of practice." In these communities individuals learn from each other, they are both teachers and learners. For example, I am wanting to write my first novel. In order to acquire the knowledge and skills to write the novel, I will network with other individuals who are also writing novels and become a part of their community of practice. Through this community I will eventually acquire the knowledge and skills to become a novelist. Very exciting!

Prior to creating this blog, I had created two other blogs, one on instructional design and another on psychology. Both were an area that I could record my ideas but I had not become actively engaged with others in the same community, I was more of a dabbler, reading other blogs but not actively connecting, and I certainly was not networked. I also found it a rather lonely experience, and no wonder, as I was not moving towards developing the interconnections that I can now see many bloggers achieve. I'm glad that I did have some prior experience before beginning NGL as I was already in that mindset - I wanted to become a member of a community, or more accurately, a member of a "tribe," or several tribes.

What has amazed me most about NGL is how it encourages students to become active learners who are creating things for themselves rather than being passive and merely working towards an assessment task. As a high school teacher I noticed how the consistent focus on assessment would prevent any discussion of other ideas that may or may not be directly related to the exam or assignment. I believed, and still do, that the focus on assessment caused my learners to operate on fear rather than on their own intrinsic desire to learn. This is particularly so in the later years of high school, where there is a primary focus on grades. NGL, appears to me, to be aware of the importance of encouraging learners to guide their own learning based on their interests and what they love.

What is happening in NGL is what I envision as the purpose of learning. Learning, regardless of the environment, should foster the ability of individuals to actively participate in creating something that they, themselves, find as valuable. It took me many years to realise this, and I realise that I needed to go through learning in environments that provide the opposite to understand that in order to learn anything effectively, I needed to be intrinsically motivated to learn it. If I wasn't, or my students were not, then we were both unlikely to continue with the learning after the subject or course was over. And what was worse, we were both unlikely to feel fulfilled.

For this reason I see learning in NGL as Stephen Downes describes in his article "'Connectivism' and Connective Knowledge," written in the Huffington Post. He writes that in a community of practice: "a learner is immersed ... in ways of doing the sorts of things practitioners do, and through practice, becomes more similar in act, thought and values to members of that community." Now this is what real learning is about.