Personal Learning Spaces: Digital Pensieves
For me, the very essence of professionalism is self-awareness. It is the recognition that only through critical self-evaluation and reflection on my practice can I hope to develop as a professional in a way which is personally fulfilling and which impacts positively on those I serve, the beneficiaries of my practice. In my case, as someone deeply passionate about further education and adult learning, it is my practice as a teacher and continually developing my approach to teaching and learning for the benefit of my learners.
Yes we have standards, yes we have codes of practice or conduct, yes we have qualifications – but these morph over time and, all too often, are subject to external pressures outside of the profession. The one constant is my professional identity: as a teacher I must be credible and command my subject, I must excel at teaching and enabling learning to take place and I must be at one with the environment I work in and all the external factors that impact on my practice.
I am best placed to reflect on my practice, share what I do well, improve what I do less well, be innovative in my personal and professional learning, contribute to the collective knowledge base underpinning my profession and evaluate the impact my learning makes on my practice (what I do) and its beneficiaries (the people I do unto). It has ever been thus for the professions and this is one of the reasons why professional bodies exist, the hunger from professionals to develop and share practice.
Technology, in particular web 2.0 technologies – the social media revolution, has changed what this means to me as a professional beyond all recognition. Historically my learning and my ability to share me learning was constrained by my biology. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle summed this up in a Study in Scarlet, where an ebullient Holmes extols to Watson the value of his carefully constructed analytical mind:
“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
We overcome this biological failing, the tendency to forget, by recording our experiences; in simple terms this may be a diary. As a professional I may like to think about it as my reflective journal, that place where I can capture my thoughts and experiences, however inconsequential I thought them at the time, so I can return to them later and use them to inform and develop my practice. The global availability of pen and paper transformed professionalism in that it allowed professionals to extend beyond the limitations of their ‘brain attics’ and share learning without the barrier of coming together to do so.
Staying with the literary metaphor, in the Harry Potter series of books J K Rowling comes to the aid of Professor Dumbledore who would otherwise struggle with his memory, not unlike Sherlock Holmes, by providing him with a ‘pensieve’. This stone basin is an extension of Dumbledore’s memory, a place where he can store and review his memories, his thoughts and experiences. He can also allow others to see into this most sacred place, sharing his learning and great wisdom with others.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all professionals had a pensieve and if all those pensieves were capable of being interconnected, if professionals were able to selectively share their learning with peers?
Welcome to my world. The world of personal learning spaces and, importantly, a world where we harness the technologies that are presented to us by web 2.0 to achieve exactly this. No longer am I constrained by my biology; I can store every experience, every thought, every conversation. I can retrieve these at any time to aid my reflection on my practice and facilitate my professional development. I can capture the learning in everything I do and share this with whoever I choose, whenever I choose.
This is disruptive learning. It doesn’t follow the traditions upheld by professional bodies and academic institutions. It doesn’t value formal, structured learning over and above the highly informal learning derived from the immediacy of my professional practice. This is my space, my digital pensieve, and I cram it full of the stuff that matters to me, the nuggets of learning that help me make sense of my professional identity.
Returning to Holmes, however, this space needs structure if it is not to become cluttered, with ‘useless facts elbowing out the useful ones’. It also needs a high degree of permanence, the stuff I choose to store in my personal learning space has great value to me, my assets, and I can ill-afford these to be lost to me through the vagaries and short-termism of the world wide web. It is only through a high degree of ordering, scaffolding which encourages reflection and the capacity to share my learning with a wider community that the true worth of my ‘digital pensieve’ is revealed.