Make Your Own Adventures in Learning

I consider link rich sites like The Marginalian to be paths to adventure through learning.  Typically, I have blazed a lackadaisical trail through these spaces, skimming the site and then clicking on links willy nilly.  I would like to be able to shift into another gear where the whole post becomes a syllabus for learning.  In this case I want to learn more about Simone Weil.

I read quite a bit of her in college and then life got in the way.  Time for a table flip.

 

Now the question is this:  how do I go about a more orderly approach to someone else’s “sweepings”?

First, I use the Chrome LinkGrabber extension to scrape all the url’s from the page

Next, I copy and paste them into an Etherpad writing space.  You can use any space at all, but I like Etherpad because they are easy to embed as below:

 

If you noted, you can see I have titled this a “course”.  And that is how I think of it–it is an adventure of links illuminated by someone else’s beacon (Maria Popova) and re-viewed through my lens.

Third, this “working through” is a time consuming process that requires gathering, making sense of, and sharing.

I like to gather in an analog manner.  By that I mean a notebook of some sort.  I fill the notebook as I move through the links–skimming, slow reading and deep reading. Usually I abandon the project before I start exploring too many secondary sets of links (represented in the etherpad by a text indent).  As I began my exploration of the Simone Weil post I discovered more about Melissa Prichard and Annie Dillard. Yes, it is ‘turtled’ links all the way down.

Here is my blank analog adventure book, a Kokuyo, college ruled Campus notebook.  The paper in here won’t bleed through gel or fountain pen ink and is of a quality to die for.  I can imagine running my hand along first page of the notebook below. So smooth.

I don’t have a master plan from this point on, but I trust that the “course” will come to me, come what may.  I suspect that as I work my way through what I already have in the existing etherpad that the expansion might become (see my optimism here) exponential.  I don’t think that concerns me since I am in business of adventuring for my own purposes. I am quite sure I will share with you as I go.

Perhaps it can grow into a larger community of those interested in Weil’s idea of “grace and attention” where each of us grows our own syllabus centered on a question that needs to be answered:  is attention the rarest and purest form of generosity?  It could, of course, be any mutually agreed upon quest.  As Bill Waterson said in the last Calvin and Hobbes:  it’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy…Let’s go exploring.”

 

 

 

1 Comment


  1. // Reply

    In many of my blog post I’ve shown how interns worked with me between 2005 and 2015 to create deeper understanding of the ideas I’ve been sharing on my website and blogs, going back to when I formed Cabrini Connections and the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993.

    In many of my blog articles I’ve posted an invitation for universities (and high schools) to create tutor/mentor connection type programs where their students study my writings and then create their own interpretations, applying those ideas to helping youth in their own communities.

    In this article you’ve demonstrated a form of deeper learning that I hope would be part of such efforts. Every one of my blog articles has layers of embedded links. My concept maps do too. For most casual learners, this is too much information. But for t hose doing a deep dive, who really want to understand and solve problems, it’s a rich resource.

    If it is used.

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