A Reflective Pause

I've been desperately looking in my photo archives for a photo I took years ago in Pittsburgh.  It shows the reflection of one building into the other. I may even have posted it before. I will not rest until I find it.  In the meantime, here's one picture I took this morning during a short reflective pause in the middle of my bike ride along the Mt. Vernon Trail.

Fog on the Potomac, Mt. Vernon Trail, Virginia - 1/16/2016

I must have hundreds of photos like this, photos of DC from the Mt. Vernon Trail.  I take the same path every weekend and I always see something different.  The light is always different.

I still do not understand much of anything about photography, light, color, composition and all of that but I know when I see something I like.

Update:  Found the Pittsburgh building.  All I needed to do was search my own blog. Duh! 

Personal Learning Plan - January to March 2016 - Learning by Doing

A few days ago, I set as my primary goal for 2016 to have more mindful, meaningful conversations. Now it's time to think through exactly how I am going to operationalize that goal and integrate it into my personal learning plan (PLP), especially in light of all the other things I am planning to do.

I don't create personal learning plans on a regular basis but when I do I find the exercise quite useful as long as I keep the timeframe relatively short.  My interests will inevitably shift.  Three months is a good timeframe for me to focus on a few specific themes.  The themes for January to March 2016 will be:  Conversations, Online Learning and Teaching, and Personal Branding and Social Media Engagement.

Click on the map to enlarge and view in a new window.

Two things to note on the map: 1) The biggest effort will be put into producing my first Skillshare class, which is the best example of how I plan on learning by doing.  I'm very much in a mood to "just do it!"; 2) As is often the case, the mapping process allowed me to identify connections across all three themes, which makes this plan very coherent (at least in my own head) and ensures that no element will be isolated and ignored.

Looking up an old Personal Learning Plan from 2009, I realized how my thinking has evolved and how my mapping has evolved as well. 

Mindful Conversations (part 2)

I don't take New Year's resolutions seriously.  I set goals for myself throughout the year at irregular intervals.  They come in cycles, and I tend to use goal setting as a way to pick myself up when I'm getting a little bored with whatever I am doing.

In most cases these goals are couched in terms of "learning".  I think that's the way I create the necessary motivation.  Nothing motivates me more than learning something new, so if my goal was to drink more water on a daily basis, I would probably end up writing up that goal as "I'm going to learn how to drink more water."

Mapping is a great way to start exploring and dissecting a goal, to make it clear, to identify specific initial steps.  Here's my initial map for the goal I set yesterday.

To keep it alive as I get engulfed in a wave of other learning opportunities (I have signed up for too many MOOCs in the next few weeks), I am integrating this goal into my Personal Learning Plan.

Mindfulness and Meaningful Conversations

This year (2016) and beyond, I resolve to pay more attention to conversations, all conversations, and to engage in more mindful conversations. Whether it is the office chatter, the table conversation with my kids, a deeper conversation with a colleague, an acquaintance or a family member, and all types of online interactions. I resolve to pay more attention so that I can learn from these conversations.