I had a very insightful and exciting time this morning in my new online course titled Corporate Learning Trends & Innovations 2008. This is a free course that covers a lot of social media ground and led by notables in the online learning field. It’s not too late to join the course and take part in the Elluminate sessions. The slideshare is from Jane Hart, Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies and one of the course leaders. I’ll link more to this learning experience throughout the week and make available the resources covered in the course.

Week 1- Social Networking–Ning, LinkedIn and Facebook
Week 2–Social Bookmarking and Tagging
Week 3– Blogs
Week 4–Aggregators and RSS Feeds
Week 5–Wikis
Week 6–Pulling it all Together

Below is a post I made on the subject of reflective practitioner.

Week 3: Blogging for Personal Learning – Work Literacy

“Don’t tell me you don’t have time or that other things are more important. Is anything in your work life more important than continuing to be better at what you do? Because that’s what reflection is about–considering what you can learn from your experiences and then doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t”.

“After reading the blog post from Michele (quote above) on Becoming a More Reflective Practitioner I was motivated to write. Her comments really address my own inertia and the inertia I see in others when I’m promoting the use of blogs and social tech/media for learning, working and professional development.

I’m an active blogger for personal learning over the past 5 years and I use blogs in my projects over that time period. I’m a dyed in the wool blog evangelist however I’m not the best at adopting a more rigorous approach to my reflective practice. I think that at times I am stuck in the shiny toy syndrome where I become enamoured with the latest social media tool. I get distracted in my reflection time by my interest in consuming new ideas and concepts that others are writing about.

Michele’s post especially resonated with me today as I’m facilitating a workshop tomorrow titled “Thinking Critically to Improve Programming”. It’s a series of workshops coupled with online learning via our blog that tries to help youth work practitioners be better at what they do – working with youth experiencing poverty and homelessness. I’ll be adding some of the resources that Michele used in her post to the mix of activities in my workshop.

Like Charlie Bluglass who commented earlier, I’m introducing social media to the youth service community in my Region and really enjoy the challenge of showing how these tools can increase impact and engagement outcomes. By following Charlie’s post, I found the larger Youth Work Online ning site which was very inspiring for me as I plan on doing a similar initiative as my project winds down over the coming months.

In closing, I am leaving my highest recommendation for a book that taught me a lot about learning and reflective practice. It’s called “crucial conversations – Tools for talking when stakes are high’.
There are many books out there that help me learn, particularly with social media but for me, this one tops them all. It is about communication between people and the bonding that can occur when crucial conversations happen. I believe these crucial conversations happen within the blogging community, creating unique learning experiences for a wide variety of writers and readers. So this exercise has got me to reflect about how I’m blogging and how I can be a better blogger by taking time to reflect about my important conversations and experiences. I’ll be working on these practices in the coming weeks, months and years.