Giving more thought to Personal Learning Narratives.

I believe this may be our first opportunity to truly explore personal learning narratives. 

First, as Wesch has noted, we have always had a grand narrative of some sort that provided cultural context and reason for learning; I believe the absence of a grand narrative not only suggests that the presiding reason to learn is for the sake of learning itself but also provides a unique opportunity in our history to focus on personal learning narratives.   

Second, technology has enabled and educators are advocating the change in the loci of control within the learning process; individuals taking control of their own learning process has become uniquely possible given dramatically increased access to information.  It’s within that context that personal learning narratives have become possible and perhaps necessary.

I believe there’s an argument that the development of personal learning narratives - with education shifting to facilitate individual learner development of personal learning environments - is critical to the further development of the information age.  If our culture and our country are to be successful moving forward, we need to focus on the issues, infrastructure and changes necessary to support personal learning narratives.

I posted this thought originally as a comment to a blog entry at Mediated Cultures by Professor Wesch, but I wanted to add a few things and include it here as well. This is a developing idea that, at the moment, is framing a larger context for all of the trends, ideas, and technologies I believe I’m understanding within education (K-16).

Several conversations and ideas have lead me to the idea of the “personal narrative” rather than the “grand narrative” suggested by Professor Wesch.

• Wesch’s publication, Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance
• Wesch’s Crisis of Significance presentation, a version of which I saw at ELI Annual 2008.
• Professor Pausch’s challenge to and hope for Carnegie Mellon’s May graduates to “find [their] passion.”
• a comment by Larry Friedlander during a video interview included in a conference presentation I attended today (7/31/08, Campus Technology 2008).
• a few personal reflections on the concepts of internal and external motivation
• a great conversation with two newly found colleagues (@pong, @jcollier) at Campus Technology’s 2008 Summer Conference (ending tomorrow 7/31 in Boston, MA)

The Crisis of Significance suggests we need a grand narrative that provides a socially, culturally adhesive reason to learn. However, we’re in an era where there’s no grand narrative; there’s no transcendent context which motivates us to learn. Professor Wesch suggests we need to identify or find a grand narrative.

For me, the absence of a grand narrative suggests the presiding “reason” to learn is learning itself; we are social beings that inherently need and want to learn “something.” However, until now we’ve always had a “grand narrative” that held significance strong enough to motivate us individually; it motivated us to learn specific things in specific ways. The underlying problem now may be that we’re struggling for the first time, as individuals, as a society and as a culture to learn for learning’s sake rather than for some other, external sake; that also means there’s no overriding grand narrative mandate to learn specific things or to learn them in specific ways.

That may explain the burgeoning social movement by educators to change the way we’re teaching and learning in formal/traditional learning spaces. That may explain the root genesis for the concept of “personal learning environments:” unique, online spaces and processes created by individuals to facilitate and control their own learning. That may explain the increasing interest in informal learning - individuals learning on their own, on the job or within organically formed groups seeking personal satisfaction.

For me then, the answer to the crisis of significance may not be to find a grand narrative. Maybe the better answer is to continue down those paths already being created to discover ways in which we may help individuals identify their own personal narrative, their passion; and, once that passion is identified, we must find new ways to facilitate the exploration and growth of that personal narrative.

That does mean that we need to fundamentally alter the way we teach and learn. One of the reasons we may be struggling to learn for learning’s sake is that all of our institutions have always served the prevailing grand narrative. They are not inherently capable of supporting and are often argued as being counterproductive to supporting anything resembling a “personal narrative.”

We have to find the significance, but it’s personal rather than grand.
We have to find some of Professor Pausch’s passion.
We have to understand that “teaching is more and more requiring a very deep respect for learners, and an awareness that each learner has a deep inner life that is relevant to the learning process that must occur within an atmosphere of mutual trust.” (taking great liberties with paraphrasing a video interview of Dr. Larry Friedlander, Stanford presented during this session)

-Chris