Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself.
– John Dewey from Democracy and Education
I’ve come across a number of interesting items on the Web and in my inbox lately. Many of them I will be sharing in a new edition of the Free Learning Monitor (due out later this week), but I thought I’d go ahead and share a few things in a blog post as well.
First up – Dan Lewis dropped me an e-mail to alert me to his “Now I Know” daily e-mail newsletter. He’s on a mission to prove true the old adage “you learn something new every day.” Worth checking out if you want a little learnin’ delivered to your inbox every day.
On the other hand, if you are mobile and poetically inclined, you really need to know about Cell Phone Haiku, where Erik Lanke has authored more than 600 haiku’s to help him with reflecting upon and making sense of his day-to-day life.
In a somewhat different vein, I think Seth Godin’s recent post on monitoring your internal dialogue provides a great example of what I mean by putting consciousness and reflection to work as everyday learning habits.
Finally, what NY Times columnist David Brooks describes as a “metacognition deficit” is very much in line with what Seth says, though his description of A Case of Mental Courage drives the point home in at a much more emotional level. I’ll leave the details of the story for you to explore on your own, but I will cite a sentence from Brooks’ column that I happen to like: “Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate.” Indeed – though I think we may as well go ahead and strike the world “public.”
Enjoy,
Jeff
P.S. – Subscribe to the Learning Monitor now, and you will automatically receive the previous edition.
