Switchback – My Learner Habits

We’re asked to declare which of the Habits of Successful Learners are, respectively, easiest and most challenging. I embrace them with equal ease; they are tried, true, lifelong “homies.” An alternative, more user-centered, less confessional (and equally enlightening) feedback request might be “Which of the Habits of Successful Learners are most important? Choose 2 and explain why you selected them.”

I would choose Habits #3 and #7.5 because they offset each other nicely. Where learning is an intensely serious activity that actualizes human potential, and breaks chains of individual and societal ignorance, play, with its power to energize and mellow, forms a critical ballast.

My Favorite Things

Week One of our Learning 2.0 adventure featured an overview of the characteristics of lifelong learning, and the habits of successful learners. Striking for me was the primacy–in the literature– of the individual learner, and the acknowledgement that the learner will determine his goal, path and process.

Our communal exercise stumbled a bit in this regard; the initial pathways were narrow and constrained, the starting gaits (not gates) jerky and counterintuitive. I would have liked to have seen more radical trust in the efficacy of the learner, to choose wisely (whether to register or defer, bruit or conceal enrollment) and to proceed appropriately (eschewing labyrinthine launch-pads for a more logical learning sequence).

Learning 2.0 embodies interesting tensions; exploring and illuminating those tensions are valuable goals for the professional information navigator.