People Learning to Personalize Learning So People Can Learn From Other People

This article focuses on creating an individualized approach to learning. It promotes a form of teaching where students essentially create their own projects and areas of study based on a general curriculum.  The article says that this style of learning has been discussed for many years, but has never been fully utilized because many teachers view new technology as "disruptive innovation."  The most important part to learning this way is to help guide students properly, while still allowing them to generally choose their own course.  This article also promotes the use of blogs, wikis and other Internet tools for learning.  This article does however make the distinction between true self directed learning and simple personalized learning.   Self directed learning is (according to the article) learning "which we do for ourselves, and personalized learning...is done for us"  Personalized learning simply alters the general curriculum to fit each student a little better. 

"We need to shift our thinking from a goal that focuses on the delivery of something—a primary education—to a goal that is about empowering our young people to leverage their innate and natural curiosity to learn whatever and whenever they need to. The goal is about eliminating obstacles to the exercise of this right—whether the obstacle is the structure and scheduling of the school day, the narrow divisions of subject, the arbitrary separation of learners by age, or others—rather than supplying or rearranging resources." 
I thought this was interesting because it discussed not just changing the way school is taught, but changing it to create an environment where students essentially teach themselves.  The "goal" is to make students want to learn.

I did, however, find it surprising how much this article supported individual learning.  I personally prefer learning where we have some choices (like how to approach a certain project) but not when we have to essentially choose our own topics to learn.  I am incredibly lazy, and I do not believe this would be the best way for me to learn. I've done projects before where the students have to teach themselves and then create a project from that, with the guidance of a teacher.  I felt like it was much harder to sift through all the information out there just to get to what was important.  I feel like students could get trapped in their own little niche of learning and be unable to expand into other realms of thought.  (For example, an art loving student might do something only related to art, a sports loving student might tie everything back into sports)  At some point, students just need to be told what to do.  I wish the article clarified what age this would work best at.  Elementary School? Middle school? High School?

I suppose for this class "connected learning" means that we are learning through individual research, then sharing the research on our blogs.  It is possible it could work, and it would definitely be a good way to share information with the entire class, but I am not convinced yet that we will learn any better by it.
I would like to learn more about scriptwriting, but mostly the visual and plot line elements.  I personally am a very visual person, so I also want to learn more about creating good shots.  There are a billion ways to shoot the same scene, but I know certain angles can completely change the mood. I just want to know what they are, and how to use them creatively to my advantage.

Diigo Article