A Reflection on Connected Learning

This weekend I am attending the Digital Media and Learning conference in Boston. I am here because I am presenting the research I have been engaging in around digital badges. Digital badges are web-enabled microcredentials that contain a host of data about a learner's accomplishments. In 2012, DML launched the Badges for Lifelong Learning competition, and funded 30 projects from various fields to develop badge systems that foster some kind of learning. These systems ranged from informal to more formal learning envronments, and targeted learners as young as 13 as well as adult professionals. Our lab was charged with following these projects over two years as they developed and implemented their badge systems. We are not evaluating badges; we are drawing out appropriate practices for developing learning ecosystems using digital badges. My work focuses on projects' assessment practices, and how choices around assessment impact the broader ecosystem.

The theme of this conference is "Connecting Practices," and I am listening to a lot of talks about open learning environments and fostering what Mimi Ito calls connected learning: http://connectedlearning.tv/infographic

As I'm listening to these talks, I keep coming back to this idea of identity, and our power as researchers to shape those identities with the way we represent their quotes and actions. Certainly, as I stated in my last post, people craft the identity they want their audience to see. But those identites are also shaped by the environment in which they engage, and they go through another round of shaping when we write about them.

On the surface, the work I am doing around badges is focused on projects' assessment practices, and for a while now, I have been doing my best to synthesize the practices across the projects and draw conclusion. This has been a tough task, and as we near the end of this project, I have found myself having to really push to get it done. But on the plane to Boston I did a lot of thinking about my position as a researcher and an educator. One important function we as educators and as researchers can serve is to empower voices, and I spent a fair amount of time thinking about how I have and how I might do that. I thought about my work with teachers, and I thought about my presentation this weekend, and I tried to think about what connected these projects. Initially, my personal research and the badges work seemed tightly connected, but as the work has gone on, that connection has become less and less apparent.

And sometime late last night I realized that the thread that runs through all of this work is this notion of connected learning. What I strive to teach in my professional development work and what I keep finding in my favorite badges projects is the way educators can balance the elements of connected learning. All of this work brings together a community of learners around a shared interest in an openly networked space to collaboratively make sense of complex concepts and ideas.  I also realized that my excitement around this kind of learning is not new; this is the kind of learning I worked to foster in my own classroom, and it was in these kinds of environments that I was able to shine as a learner. This is the kind of learning I have always been passionate about, even if I didn't always have this vocabulary.

The reason, it seems, that the badges work had become so laborious, is I had lost sight of my original goal in the badges project: to relay the narratives around projects' efforts to foster connected learning through the use of digital badges. We've been writing for a while that "it's not just about the badges," but I forgot to step back and look at the learning ecosystems as a whole. The ones who foster connected learning have found a way to balance the formative and summative functions of assessment, and have transformed their learning ecosystems into dynamic spaces where communities of learners can engage with one another in personally meaningful contexts to collaboratively solve problems.  And while the context of the professional development work is different, the goal is the same. I need to make sure this thread is clear in all my work. When I left the classroom, I told my students that they inspired me, and that I wanted to teach people to foster the kinds of learning evironments in which these students could shine. They help me keep things in perspective and remember that I have a responsibility to show educators a way to foster learning environments in which everyone can succeed and shine.

I have an excellent opportunity to highlight the way connected learning can give learners across ages and domains agency in and power over their own learning. I have the opportunity to make a case for fostering connected learning in broader and more formal contexts. And I have the opprotunity to craft my narratives in a way that highlights the important work the badging projects and the teachers with whom I work are doing. They have crafted identites around their work, and I can provide a forum where they can show their work. If I write carefully, I can let them tell their own stories and empower them with a voice. And the people who foster these kinds of environments allow learners to develop their own identities and have agency over their own learning. That is exciting.