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This is what I asked each student to do: 1) create a series of three goals or metas, one progressively more complex than the other, and each building upon the other, that were to be accomplished his term. The first goal was to be done by the end of March, the second by the end of April, the third maybe by the end of the term…but probably not. 2) create a series of tasks that s/he felt would lead to realizing those goals. 3) blog about about his or her progress at least 2 times per week 4) At the end of the term: write up a final self assessment (in English or in Spanish), reflecting upon the progress completed, including the work done in class that would contribute to these goals, and assign a grade for the term. The students needed to evidence of their progress as a way of justifying their chosen grade. CAVEAT: If the grade s/he chose was lower than one than I would have selected, they would get my grade and an explanation. If the grade was higher, we would continue the conversation and try to see what it was that I was missing. I was willing to be (and wanted to be!) swayed, given that this was the student’s assessment of his/her personal learning goals in Spanish.

Some (but very few indeed) met ALL of their goals. Almost all acknowledged that they had set up unrealistic expectations for themselves (in terms of how much they could get done in a semester) and many used their self assessment as a way to set up future goals for their language growth. (Exactly the kinda thing you hope to see happen…learning extending beyond the limits imposed by the classroom).

A shy, timid young man, he did not mention in his evaluation the class discussion he led, and managed, and blogged about at the end of the term… nor did he see how any of this was helping him move towards his most lofty goal…to be able to travel with friends in Spain and to be able to communicate with ease and without anxiety.

It pains me to read this, but not because of the critiques she makes about me, the tools, or the class. It pains me because Edie passed on an opportunity to try something new, experiment, take a calculated risk…all things she will eventually have to do when she travels in another culture. It’s sad because she was the only student who did not “let go” of something during the semester and instead just held on tight to how she wanted this class to be, vs how it really, truly was. Unstructured to her meant undirected. Allowing the group to decide the flow of the class frustrated her, because the cadence of the class was not one that was controlled by the teacher and therefore predictable

In the end, she presented me with a chart that logged over 40 hours of Skype conversations with a native speaker she eventually found, and 110 pages (!) of chat transcripts with others with whom she tried to make regular contact. In class, as a result of her out of class experiences, she became more involved and engaged, eventually leading a class discussion about her interests in music, but doing so such that it wove itself in with the topic the class was discussing that week.

We need to rethink how we learn and deal with the tacit knowledge.

Dusty wanted to put Maui on the surfing map. Dusty found four peers in the same age group and decided to build a scheme of collaboration - the likes of which the world has never seen. Dusty was the first junior champion ever in Maui and came up with a new genre - aerial surfing

Here are some things they did in their learning community:They are willing to keep failing because they knew they could learn from failure.They collectively analysed each frame of videos of the best surfers across the world.The used video camera to capture and analyse their own moves. They deconstruct their own technique by watching each frame of their work on the beach.They pulled ideas from various sports - windsurfing, skateboarding, mountain biking, motorcross, etc. The cool stuff is they've taken ideas from different domains and applied them to their own domain. They've understood the idea of 'spikes', where they've travelled to the expertise hotspots for surfing across the world to learn their trade. Now they're a bit of a spike in themselves.

This is an example of deep collaborative learning with each other. They are people that are passionate about a trade and they chase extreme performance with a deep questing disposition. They learn themselves from the things that others are doing around them. They have a commitment to indwelling -- they soak up the world around them.

The second story JSB has is about WOW - The World of Warcraft. It's a massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG). There's a reason we need to care. This is the first domain where we've discovered a place where we don't have diminishing returns, we have exponentially increasing returns. The sense of joint collective activity is pretty awesome as one of the TWU students pointed as well. The core of the game is really more the social life on the edge of the game. The edge is often called a knowledge economy. WOW is way too complicated to play without complex analysis tools and dashboards, but these dashboards are tailored to each player to measure their own performance and are a key to their mastery at the game. This is quite curious -- don't managers develop dashboards to look at their people? This is obviously a game changing way to self-reflect. The cool thing that goes is after action reviews -- this is very in tune with the Agile Retrospectives idea. This is an example of blending the tacit and the cognitive. This is collective indwelling and reflection. While they marinate and learn in a social context, they also reflect together when they're done, so they can learn from each other. This is the way grandmasters learn -- they practice with peers and then reflect on what they did. This is the way hackers practice their trade.

There's an incredibly rich knowledge economy around this game. On a typical night there are about 10-15000 new ideas coming up about the game. There are blizzard forums, databases, blogs, wikis, videos and what not. The way people absorb all of this is that guilds (player teams) self-organise into being a knowledge refining community to work together, curate content and then collectively learn amongst themselves. This is the idea of a personal learning network (PLN) IMO.