Q. What is something you learned on your own recently? After doing the readings, what elements of your own learning experience would you connect to the readings? Provide at least two points of connection to the readings.
Daniel Pink, in his book, described an autonomy audit as a way for employees or members of a group to determine how much freedom they have to work they way they want. (Pink, 2011 p. 166) I thought I would score pretty high on that scale thinking about the day to day work I do. When I really analyzed each of the four questions, however, I didn’t score as high as I thought I would. This led me to wonder how my own work experience and how I learn on the job is affected by my autonomy. Would I be more effective and would I learn more skills if I had more freedom? I’m not sure the answer is yes. There needs to be some freedom, but there also needs to be some constraint to get the best results. I think the scale that Pink presents shouldn’t be looked at as 0 is worst and 40 is best. There is a big range in the middle and the sweet spot will depend a lot on the individual person.
Malcolm Knowles also piqued my interest with his recitation of Alfred Whitehead’s idea that the duration of human life span in relation to the longevity of cultural change impacts learning. (Knowles, 1980, p 44) This notion that you can’t just learn something and let it carry you through your lifetime but rather you need to learn how to learn because you need to update or even completely change your skillset continuously throughout your life now. Much of the overall management and deployment of student and staff technology stays the same each year but the details can change dramatically from year to year because of constant change in technology. Rather than focusing on the exact process of how we re-deploy the technology, we need to focus on how we can create that process each deployment to match the new technology.
“Differentiated instruction is an approach that enables instructors to plan strategically to meet the needs of every learner.” (TEAL Center Fact Sheet No. 5, 2010, p. 1) On a small scale, this is what much of the education I do with staff and students each day. Every interaction is a chance to educate them on specific issues and it is tailored to what knowledge they already have and what information they need to increase their skills and confidence.
Q. How do you interact with other professionals? How do you find inspiration to continue your own growth?
On a daily basis I do most of my interaction with colleagues through written communication in the form of email or our ticketing system and second to that is face to face conversations. A large part of my job as tech support is solving problems but also educating users to help prevent issues in the future. These interactions tend to expose areas where more widespread education is needed and where I may need to hone my skills (or learn new ones) to be able to troubleshoot, solve and educate end users about issues.
Q. What is a specific idea you hope to take forward from the readings into your work with other adults?
Moving into the future, I would like to implement some version of the 20% (maybe just 10%) time to work on projects that interest me and that aren’t dictated by the specific demands of my position. There tends to always be some crisis to work on but there are lots of other areas of tech support where things could be streamlined or resources created to help with self-troubleshooting but putting out the current fire always dictates what project is worked on.
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