A Short Post About Personal Learning.

I'm currently sat in my caravan eating cake, drinking coffee and looking down onto Killiedraught bay, and once in awhile having a little check into Twitter. It's fascinating; with vasectomies, heated debate on learning preferences (nee styles) and a whole host of specialist requests, encapsulated by " has anyone got a video resource about shopping in a German market?" ( Nein meine fruend :-()

What is fascinating about this is the surfacing of personal knowledge. A cracked joke about a vasectomy, not making a "vas deferens", led to a label of a "Science Teacher" joke ( which it most certainly is, and also stolen from Bob Mortimer).  I've lost count on how many Twitter exchanges conclude,or ,search for common ground with the phrase " ...and your own experience of course".

 Then, slurping my coffee I read a tweet which ended " check out my MA research" which induced a memory flood of exchanges that swap (old)blog posts as retorts and view points.  Sadly I'm not making the point that everyone I follow on Twitter is a self absorbed, egotistical indigenous educator. That's just me. I'm (sic) making the point that we value greatly the knowledge we have acquired by ourselves and for ourselves. We value it so much we want to share it, refer to it and compare it with that of others. Not in a demonstrative way, but to learn.

 Juxtapose this with the national curriculum we offer our students? Juxtapose it with the Ebacc? Juxtapose it with ,dare I say it, the real world? Where is the balance? Can we really want to educate young people on the back of "do as I say, not as I do".  This is not a post for answers, but, as Simon Brown has consistently said since returning from High Tech High. "The answer is project based learning." Students deserve the opportunity to make choices (real ones not contrived time tabling ones) , they deserve to collaborate, share and value their knowledge, (which may have been taught), they deserve an opportunity to be proud everyday in a variety of ways that matter.


 - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone