Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 20 seconds
So…if there weren’t already enough reasons for you to sign up for #et4online already (I already blogged about Bonnie Stewart, Gardner Campbell and the Unconference and Jesse Stommel) – you get the chance to meet the keynote speaker – Mimi Ito! Early bird deadline is Feb 25!
It’s taken me a while to write about Mimi because I don’t know her a well as Bonnie or Jesse, and I haven’t read as much of her work as I have Gardner’s, but she’s definitely someone I’d love to meet someday.
I didn’t know Mimi at all going in to #ccourses last semester – but when I read this blogpost by her, I fell in love. Here was someone who’s been researching connected learning (see the book which I’ve started but haven’t had the chance to finish), who will speak at #et4online about connected learning, and who is really a leader in the area of connected learning… who then writes this on her blog, after a few weeks of #ccourses:
My excitement quickly turned to terror as I watched the social media stream turn from a trickle to a whole web of lively tributaries, and I went running to help to @cogdog. Help! How do I know what to pay attention to?? Thank goodness for my more experienced co-facilitators and the power of co-learning.
Alan offered some tech tips for managing feeds, but most importantly, the first suggestion he had was, “Give up keeping up and following everything.” And around then Mia posted a lovely suggestion that we consider the course a “guilt-free learning zone” in response to Kevinbreaking through the lurker wall. My threat-sensitive, self-monitoring, introvert, barely-blogs-a-couple-times-a-year self breathed a sigh of relief (read Quiet if you need a decoder for the personality terms).
How many people would admit vulnerability this way?
And then she writes this:
In many ways these different forms of participation fit into what Internet product people might call an > engagement funnel where newcomers and the less net savvy like me march steadily from awareness to engagement to becoming active contributors and content generators. With enough exposure and engaging offerings, we will get pulled into the vortex and become “Alan.”…
…Connected Courses is a veritable cornucopia of ways of participating with no central platform. And unlike a community of practice, there is an abundance of different forms of expertise and practices, and social norms that are colliding through a loosely orchestrated cross-network remix, immersive theaterwhere participants are all experiencing a different narrative. Its not a funnel or even a community with coherent practices, but a hybrid network, more like a constellation that looks different based on where one stands and who one is. I love that @Bali_Maha is the life of the Twitter stream but feels burdened by the course readings, while I might knock down a few books in preparation for a live session but neglect to read a blog or tweet for a couple days.
She says all this, and while she was not able to participate fully via Twitter, that blogpost, and the next one where she comments on ethics of research show that she had her finger on the pulse of #ccourses, even though she was not engaging in the same way as an “Alan” or “Howard” (I’m copying her way of writing about it).
I love that she does ethnographic research, and that she “found that the perspectives of ethnography was really useful for looking at these subaltern and disempowered groups.” – I so believe ethnographic research helps with this.
I still don’t know everything I want to know about Mimi, but I know I’d love to meet her 🙂
I also love this infographic describing connected learning 🙂
Credit: Connected Learning Research Network and Digital Media & Learning Research Hub
This Connected Learning Infographic is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. You may Share and Adapt it, but you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
