I’m just starting to realize that I’ve been messing around for far too long. The simple fact that I’m here embedded in this COETAIL journey, however, indicates that I might not be messing around for much longer.
In Living and Learning with New Media, a study completed by the John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation, the authors state that, “what is characteristic of these initial forays into messing around is that youth are pursuing topics of personal interest… in a self-directed way.” Now, I’m not one to call myself youthful, as hangovers and sports injuries are lasting a lot longer than they used to be.
However, I find a certain degree of parallelism happening between the youth of the MySpace and The Facebook era and my own digital journey through COETAIL (which according to George Siemen’s Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, should be an obsolete course in a matter of months due to the shrinking half-life of knowledge). I sought out this course with self-directed passion and curiosity after being exposed to it by the formative nodes of an unintentional PLN birthing. I did this while messing around (or is that hanging out?) on our school blog, later conferring with COETAIL alumni colleagues and making nomenclature connections back to my first Learning 2.0 conference.
The goal of enrolling in COETAIL and messing around a little more was two-fold. One, as the Living and Learning with New Media report states, “this more exploratory mode of messing around is an important space of experimental forms of learning that open up new possibilities and engagements.” I was enthusiastic to see how I could continue to experiment with new forms of technology and digital literacy in my classroom. I always want to be taking risks and trying out new methodologies for instructing students and open up new possibilities for them to show their growth and understanding. The insatiable curiosity of the digital dark hole has led to a continuous experiment in education over the last two years, which has brought me to active engagements in the COETAIL community today.
Another reason I decided to experiment with this self-directed learning journey relates to Siemen’s Connectivism theory, “when knowledge, however, is needed, but not known, the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a vital skill. As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses.” I know little to nothing about digital literacy and its potentials. That’s why I have decided to hang around those who are “geeking out” and are more versed in the field. Siemens goes on to say, “learning now occurs in a variety of ways – through communities of practice, personal networks, and through completion of work-related tasks.” I’m quickly learning that participating in this course is just as much about the knowledge I will be gaining as it is about the connections I will be making through my PLN. With connectivism being, according to Siemens, “a learning process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources,” by messing around in COETAIL over the next year and a half, I will have firmly planted myself not only within the adaptive organism, but also as an active member and contributor to it. This will solidify my evolution from being a lurker who hangs out and leeches the system into a co-creating node with certain degrees of specialization within an inter-connected system.
The Living and Learning with New Media report goes onto say that, “messing around involves tinkering with and exploration of new spaces of possibilities… we see them as a necessary part of self-directed exploration in order to experiment with something that might eventually become a longer-term, abiding interest in creative production.” It is with that hope of a longer-term abiding interest in creative digital pedagogy that I find myself here and now. As I navigate through the genres outlined in The Living and Learning with New Media report (Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out), I doubt I’ll firmly embed myself within the Geeking Out crew by the time I’m done wandering this COETAIL path. However, I just might be done cleaning up the mess I’ve made leading up to this point.
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