A couple of weeks ago, I settled on the first iteration of my bullet points. Then a couple of days ago, while out running and listening to a podcast, I got closer to my tweet, or better yet, a phrase. It was just a word someone used on the podcast, not even related to my research, but which I felt captured the essence within the bullet points. I’ve found that teachers’ professional learning on Twitter is not a single thing, but many interwoven things brought together, working together. The word I heard on the podcast was ‘hybrid,’ but on getting home from the run, discovered it carried too much baggage, associated as it was with blended learning and more about a mixture of on and offline experiences. Even so, I knew I needed something which conveyed a similar sense of different elements working together; this is after all what assemblage is. After shuffling through a thesaurus or two (said he, neatly sidestepping the plural form), I settled on ‘Compound Learning.’ Although it didn’t feel quite the same as ‘hybrid learning,’ the more I think about it and try to flesh it out, the more right it feels.
I really like the idea of riffing off one word like ‘compound’, reminds me of my yearly focus on ‘
one word‘.
Reading through your thoughts I was left wonder about the place of Twitter within it all. I understand that one needs a focus, but it sometimes feels arbitrary when reading through your work. I met you via a podcast, picked up resources via Diigo, read your blog and engaged on Twitter. When I think about this, I am left thinking that if you took Twitter out of the conversation – if such an extraction were possible – that not much would change. Is Twitter then the ‘original’ compound? It feels like the focus is connected learning or learning?
Not sure if that makes any sense? I am sure that I just don’t get it, but I thought I would share none the less.
