December’s Big Question from the Learning Circuits Blog is “What I have learned About Learning in 2008?” Well, because I am a learning professional, I give a lot of importance to my personal learning. And owing to my profession, I am fortunate to understand and appreciate the value of learning.
I started my learning this year on the perfect note - I wrote my first blog! I think this simple activity brought me closer to most of my learning this year. After I wrote my first blog, I found myself interested in exploring the world of Web 2.0, social networking, and collaborative tools and technologies. I started to write atleast one blog every month and use you tube, slideshare, twitter, delicious, and joined many online discussion forums to read and share my views. Through all of this, I felt completely responsible for my own learning.
I extended my best practices to my training sessions and my trainees. I incorporated you tube videos in my classroom training sessions, referred to multiple e-learning and instructional design blogs to update my 'legacy training' in Instructional Design, incorporated online reading activities as pre-work and post training reflection activities as blogs for my trainees, subscribed to second life and shared the experience with many others, reviewed some powerful Brandon Hall E-learning Awards nominees (e-learning courses) as an independent judge, used many free web tools...and...developed my personal learning network.
I also felt very satisfied and energized during the entire learning process. This learning was mostly self-directed. Blogging helped me reflect on the things that I was doing and allowed me to articulate my learning with each activity. It helped me connect with many other people all around the world. It helped me break the shackles of my own mind.
To sum it up, in the year 2008:
- I learned that Web 2.0 is not about tools and technologies - it is about a new way to learn.
- I learned that the more I shared, the more I learned.
- I learned that the world is indeed a small place and its very easy to connect, if you want to.
- I (re) learned that to learn, I need to reflect, apply, make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes.
- I (re) learned that learning is limitless.