Learning subjectives are goal-like things I hope come to pass due in whole or in part to my involvement in #rhizo15.I guess I'm interested in understanding learning communities better and thinking about learning in new ways. If I'm going to do that I have to break out my old tools (since I haven't acquired any new ones yet) and drill down to the bedrock: What's a community? What's learning?
It's probably incredibly arrogant of me to think that I can summarize either community or learning in some neat, all-encompassing way. But I need something; something I can start with and build up or chip away at. So timidly putting forth a couple of assertions I'll state:
Community in this context is a group of people drawn together by some common interest. People engage with each other. Share knowledge. Develop skills. Acquire perspectives. Know and are known. Over time personal levels of interest, engagement, knowledge, skills, and experience are increasing and decreasing in relation to the rest of the community, and some kind of sum over everyone's levels of these things represents characteristics of the community that in some unfathomable (to me) arithmetic expresses the "health" of the community. A person can drift away from the community and the community can drift away from a person.And crawling farther out on this limb I'll say that:
Learning amounts to on-going effects of participating in the community.I wonder what my understanding of community and learning will look like by the time #rhizo15 wraps up.
