This class assignment has pushed me beyond my comfort zone again and again, forcing me to experiment with technologies, including Flickr, wikis, Goodreads, Skype, image generators, widgets, personalized search engines, Diigo, blogs, Twitter, YouTube, podcasts, Wordle, and Google Forms. Some of them were already familiar to me while some were completely new. For instance, I already used Goodreads, blogs, and YouTube and loved them. The others, though, were new or oft-avoided, and I had varying reactions. (You can read more about that at the end of this post.)
Whether I loved or hated a technology, though, I have to admit I learned tons and tons about how our world works, and I tried to take each opportunity and really embrace it for all it was worth. Sometimes that resulted in long rants, I will admit, but even in the midst of my rants, I found myself enjoying the experiences and opportunities to analyze and work with new things. Oddly enough, one of my favorite posts was about a technology I basically rejected on principle (although I do look at it occasionally)--my post about Twitter (#8 on the list below).
What have I learned in the past four months? Well, in short, I have learned more about how to learn. And that's the point of this whole series of assignments. To expand on that, I didn't have to love each technology. I just had to learn about them and explore the opportunities and offerings of the World Wide Web. I was free to embrace, discard, or think about each technology further--but I learned about a number of programs, I learned how to use them, and then I sometimes took it a step further to explore how these technologies compare to past norms or other mediums. I've also learned that learning itself doesn't--and shouldn't stop.
I'm graduating this year with my Bachelor's degree, and the more I think about this stage in my life, the more I realize that the diploma is not the goal itself. What is infinitely more valuable is the learning along the way. We call the graduation ceremony "Commencement," but that's a lie. "Commencement" means "beginning," and the so-called "Commencement" that celebrates graduation obscures the fact that we have been living and learning all along. The name makes us think that we are just now starting our lives, and while that idea may be momentarily freeing, it is also immensely frustrating because it makes us think that the last ___ years of our lives have been a waste. For me, if I had to think of Commencement as a beginning, I would be angry because I have probably wasted a full third of my lifetime.
NOT SO.
No one can convince me that my life has been nonexistent for the past four years of college--or, goodness, the last seventeen years of education! On the contrary, sometimes I have felt most alive when in the midst of learning. It's when I'm not learning that I feel stagnant. But that also makes me realize, though, that if I love to learn, graduation doesn't force me to stop--it just forces me to look for new learning opportunities, whether through graduate school or *GASP* the real world! And that is what Learning 2.0 is really all about. And that is also why Learning 2.0 should never end, because even though it's about the technology, it really isn't all about the technology. That's why "Learning" is the prevailing noun and "2.0" is the extra tidbit slapped on there to make learning seem more hip and modern.
P.S. If you haven't read any/all of the posts in this series but really, really, really want to, you can access them here:
- Learning 2.0.1: The 7.5 Steps to Getting Your Life Together and Becoming a Good Lifelong Learner!
- Beauty and the Beast: A Librarian's Fantasy
- Creating Classroom Collaborations Via Wikis
- Some Things I Have Been Reading Recently
- Skypetastic-less
- Why Go Diigo?
- Blogs, Blogs, and More Blogs!
- G.K. Chesterton, Twitter, and the Lost Art of the Story
- YouTube and Booktalks
- Podcasts and the Art of Marketing with Sensory Appeal
- The Wordle World of Words
- Blog Survey! Please Fill This Out!
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