I’ve been reflecting on this too – as I was putting the bus analogy together (to make sense of it all for me) I kept coming back to these questions:

1. What was Leigh displaying that we perhaps aren’t seeing elsewhere (in teacher and learners generally)?
2. If we aren’t seeing this so readily, why not? What has it got to do with transfer of skills and understanding in a range of environments (on and offline)? And could this be part of the “problem”?
3. You, Leigh, articulated some of the things you do on a daily basis, using RSS, Delicious and Bloglines, but also demo-ed stuff you weren’t articulating – like using tabs, the number of screens you had open (something I think we are seeing more of in those familiar with, and more “native” to, the internet and browsing on a daily basis), to name a few actions.

So, I was trying to uncover more by using the bus analogy, because there are things we tend to take for granted (and often go unspoken as a result) and things we try to cover (as you did, very well).

Learners (especially inexperienced learners) always seem to take on some of the attributes and habits modelled in their teachers: a teacher in horticulture recounted how the students began wearing the green “Hard Yakka” style tops and pants as she normally did, as they became more familiar with her as a teacher and with the subject matter (ie. gardening) – they began to embody the elements the teachers demonstrated.

OK so, let me try to be more specific about your behaviour I was intrigued with:

1. the way you had arranged your Bloglines folders according to your daily activities (people often use themes or people) – to me, you were maintaining/controlling the flow of information to you – you further explained this by making some comments about some of the feeds you read/grazed through/paid greater attention to. Good eg of developing an online literacy I thought.

In addition, your comment about whether something was important to read further could be determined by the presence of a post in other blogs/RSS feeds too – I really liked that – it’s almost a bit digg-ish, but manually so!

What’s your thinking on this potentially being “group-think”? I’m thinking of how a joke gets circulated, as a methaphor for “talk” as it goes around…

2. using a delicious tag such as “read_more” (I think you said it was Sean’s idea) – again most people use a thematic tag or a tag such as year or month etc. This was one thing I learnt actually – I have a “follow-up” tag now (except will I ever get to them all!)…this is another way of managing information and the time taken to read or return to things at a later point.

I guess I’m coming at this from the point of view of trying to understand where people (learners and/or teachers – whoever) currently stand (in terms of exposure, experience, maturity, etc) and how we manage and scaffold ongoing learning so we can begin to udnerstand our own learning behaviours.

As technology becomes for sophisticated in its pervasiveness (thus often hiding the process used from the user), we might lose sight of the processes through which we coem to understand (a) how something works, (b) how to use something, (c) how to re-use soemthing, or (d) solve problems, etc.

Hmmm, lots to think about! And thanks for putting it out there Leigh

Marg

But what behaviours did I exhibit that you found intriguing!!? Come on, don’t let it hang there, out with it