Back in October, I set some goals for myself and vowed to report on my progress in January.  I can now report that I have met goal #1 by reading The Social Life of Information, The Long Tail, and A Whole New Mind.  (I’m still trying to get my hands on a library copy of Here Comes Everybody and The Wisdom of Crowds.)  I keep meaning to post about them, but blogging hasn’t made my list of priorities lately.

In November, I presented at the AEA conference in Denver.  I’ve prepared a report based on the same data as my presentation and am in the process of getting feedback from professors before preparing and submitting an article to the still yet-to-be-determined journal.  I have not quite achieved my goal, but I have made significant progress.

My third goal was to “endure to the end” of the two courses in which I was unofficially enrolled.  I did complete all of the readings and assignments for the New Media course, though my attendance via Skype trailed off near the end of the course.  I imagine that my status as an unofficial enrollee in the course is one reason why I didn’t receive a lot of feedback on the chapter I wrote as part of the class project; I wasn’t particularly motivated to seek it.  Still, the pre-existing flesh and blood friendships that I had with several members of the New Media course influenced my decision to complete the course assignments, including contributing to the class project.  I never had the same kind of connection to the thousands of members of the connectivism class.  Even my efforts to pare the class down didn’t seem to help me make it personable.  I suspect that the lack of a bond with members of the connectivism class contributed to my decision (by default) to not complete the course.  

Whatever goals I acheived or didn’t achieve, to whatever degree I achieved them, I feel good about having attempted them, in some cases acheiving them, and in all cases progressing toward them.  As is usual with the arrival of a new year, like many others, I thought about my year and my life’s direction and set some goals.  I first wrote out a long list of things that I wanted to accomplish in life.  Some of the goals were financial, some were academic, and most were personal.  (Strangely, blogging didn’t appear anywhere on my list.)  I made five categories of goals  from my list and for the past two weeks have made an effort to do at least one action in each area that will move me closer to my eventual goals.    A departure from my previous goal setting habits, I set no deadline for achieving any of these goals.  This time, it’s all about the journey.

Yesterday while reading Michele Martin’s blog I came across a link to a post on Sacha Chua’s blog entitled “What do I want to Learn?” It’s a good question.

The easy answer is “everything”, but that simply isn’t true. I’ve learned enough to know that there are lots of things that I don’t want to know any more about. I have no desire to understand particle physics or how to make an atom bomb. I know that don’t want learn the gory details that a coroner uses to determine how long a body has been rotting in the woods. I have no real interest in card tricks and I really hope to avoid learning anything about a celebrity divorce trial ever again. Even with all of the things that I don’t want to learn about, there are still more things that I want to learn about than I could ever hope to master in my time on Earth. This post is to help me prioritize some of my learning goals.

Teaching
I want to learn how to be a better teacher. I believe that good teachers need to know what is important to teach and how to make others care about learning it. In general, I think it is more important to teach skills than content, but I’m still trying to learn which skills are most important to teach. While I am struggling with which skills to teach, I am simultaneously trying to figure out the key(s) to motivating people to learn and to change. Additionally, I believe that to become more successful as a teacher I need to improve my communication and presentation skills.

Languages
I want to learn to be a world citizen. I believe that in order to be a true world citizen, I need the ability to communicate with speakers of other languages. I am a native English speaker and I have an intermediate-level ability in Spanish. Based on these two languages alone, I can already communicate with a significant portion of the world’s population, but I am still unable to communicate with the majority of people on Earth. I want to become a fluent speaker of Spanish and I want to learn Mandarin. If I can handle those languages, then I may try for more.

Artistic Expression
I have many, many hobbies. In some respects, most of my hobbies have a very practical bent to them. I like to cook, to knit, to sew, etc. I want to learn basic carpentry and how to garden. Despite their practical nature, each of these hobbies is for me, a venue for artistic expression. They are a way to make my home a more personal and pleasant space for myself and my family. They are a way to make things beautiful. Photography is perhaps my least practical interest, but even it has the function of preserving memories and documenting family history.

In the past, I’ve considered myself completely devoid of musical talent. Despite this, I think that I would like to try to learn how to play simple songs on the piano and the guitar and I’d be ecstatic if I could learn to sing.

Right now, as I work on my research projects and dissertation, my primary focus is to learn about teaching. However, I’m going to try not to lose sight of my other learning goals.