Distributed learning - diagnosis step

Hi everyone,

As I prepare to travel to the US to meet people, organize a new retreat and discuss participatory action research (PAR) with doctoral students, I am musing on how the educational side of my life merges with the diagnosis step in our personal PAR work. Bear with me for a minute and let me see if I can make some sense of these ideas and that they might be useful to you.

Let me make a few assumptions:

1. You want to make some changes in your life (let me use the ubiquitous lose weight as an example).
2. The first step is diagnosis (how many who have lost weight feel like you know all about it because you have done it so many times before?)
3. So what you have to do is diagnose what would be new to you? A question you might ask is, "Who is saying something (about your topic) that I have not heard before?

Now the principles of distributed learning come in. The world wide web is a fantastic place, and held among it are nodes (or gathering places) of information. Flickr is a node for pictures (but not just photos, pictures of peoples notes, diagrams for books, all types of things). Slideshow.com is node for presentations, as YouTube is for videos. All the major companies like Google, yahoo, MSN have groups - you can search to see if there are groups in the area you want to research.

All the time what you want on your radar is the new, then when you hear something you follow it up, make your own decisions, craft your own plan.

Before you know it your ideas are re-energized and you are ready to move into some kind of action.

In the last few weeks I have been on a diagnosis binge. Every morning for a couple of hours I found myslef researching what was new in education - this is where I came up with these ideas. But i also came up with an idea for some consulting business I want to do. I put it into action last night as I asked some friends if they were interested in working with me on these ideas. Tomorrow I go see a man who might be a prospective client. We'll see how it goes.

The important factors here are that new information is energizing because it helps us focus on potential and there is something in the human spirit that loves potential.

I hope these ideas inspire and that this finds all of you following your potential.
All the best,
Alana