I hereby decree that PLE and PLN now refer to personal _living_ environments and networks. Cinching the borders in narrowly to the word “learning” brings along too much historical baggage, pinning the idea of learning down to a discrete, particular time and process that we endure only as long as necessary before resuming our journey somewhere else.

We need to help students stop thinking about education as something they get done and help them understand learning as a continual lifelong process.

In the archaic– and continuing– model of higher education it is possible to discard the activities and paraphernalia of learning. With more or less nostalgia, “former” students can recall the strange rituals of library-going, note-taking, research, and information management and resource management that they took part in the same way they more or less fondly remember dorm life, cafeteria food, and co-eds. Except for those continuing in academia, where some aspects of being a learner continue in (often rather) abstracted ways, the only thing part of the experience that remains “active” is an institutional email address and machines generating billing statements for student loans.

In the emerging model, students learn to navigate, assess, construct and participate in a living network that comprises the heart of their learning network and they take that with them when their time as part of any particular institution’s offerings come to a change.

Though all of these activities have their parallels in later work and life, few former students (again, outside of those who become career academics) will again need to perform traditional research activities or face a pile of assigned reading and even fewer will will be authoring papers or cramming for exams. But if we do our jobs properly they will be participants in professional communities; they will have a desire for self-expression; they will be members of the pro-sumer class. They may not need to figure out MLA format and how to format footnotes in word, but they will need to know how to blog, wikify and twitter. They may not have to create an annotated bibliography, but they will need to know how to marshal and share resources with del.icio.us- and flickr-like systems.

“Going to school” is an activity that has a life and dies; learning is a continuing process. Enrollments and degree programs terminate; personal living networks accompany learners through life– the ultimate educational institution– serving as companion, confidante, and oracle alike.

“We need a basic currency for measuring good deeds, so I’m going to go with the aforementioned lunch. One meal for one person. And, in honor of that woman by the hot dog stand, I’m calling it the Stacy.”

While trying to figure out what is happening and what I am doing with my life (and how to survive it), a timely pointer (life preserver?) was sent my way to an essay/presentation by Darren Barefoot for the recent Gnomedex conference. The piece is about doing good in a technological time, some of the ways that it is possible and an incitement for each of us to think about what we could and should be doing ourselves.

Matt Mullenweg has posted his slides from BlogTalk 2006 [PDF]. They have a lot more to do with life than code… with how to be rather than how to blog. Great quotes and pics– most of which I’ve seen before, being a jazz fanatic– and not a single techie bit to be seen. That’s actually what attracted me to WordPress in the first place– not all the good, geeky aspects, but that, at the time, it was called Mingus. That intrigued me. Then it became Strayhorn and I knew I had to have me some of that.

What’s with the idea of the “gift of life?” Someone directed me to a brief piece about the appearance of the reader which spurred me to read some long neglected email in which this pair of theories of art were reproduced:

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you have to think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgement of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. It is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life. –Stanley Kunitz

and

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t. –Theodore Roethke

But what if life isn’t a gift? What if the only entity for which life is a gift is the cancer that eats away constantly at our edges? If being forcibly and duplicitously restrained from going where you want; if being forced to constantly be close to seeing something that could complete a small part of your self without ever being close enough to grasp; if the haste that damages us is the result of a headlong propulsion from without… if these are the “gift of life” I can’t conceive of the equivalent of coal in my stocking.