LearningConversations

Peggy: I would say that this is the most remarkable experience of my life, for the reason that in most circles, I am the go-to person. I am the information person. I am the how-do-you-do-it person. In WoW, that role has been reversed, and I am the struggling learner. (A lot of it is due to time constraint. I don't have the time to go and research which add-on to use for my Holy Paladin heals and delve into the backstory as much as I'd like to.) It's a fabulous experience for me to see how the struggling child feels in the classroom, to see how you might be reluctant to raise your hand and ask a question because you feel "less than." It's really reminded me that I have kids at all different readiness levels around me, and I have to make sure I'm not addressing just the top or the bottom or the middle. Things do have to be level. Language does have to be changed. It's a remarkable transference of understanding for me. I step out of the role of expert and become the role of learner. That's what we need our teachers to do.

But most schools and classrooms will no longer be the central learning hubs they are today.   Today’s model of schooling is to bring the learner to the knowledge—tomorrow we will bring the knowledge to the learners.   We must recognize that schools and classrooms are becoming nodes in networked learning communities.   We must begin to think about how to organize learning in networked communities and not limit learning within the boundaries of classrooms and school buildings—which would be to limit our thinking to what has been possible in the past in a single school or node.

The new and more powerful opportunity available to educators today is to use these technologies to help individuals collaboratively construct networked learning communities that will accelerate and augment the community’s learning, as well as each individual’s learning.

We need to get rid of the circle and enable them to be learners in an open learning environment (see Figure 5). One of the large “L’s” in the diagram is the expert learner