My Learning Ecology
Learning comes from a variety of sources throughout your life. The sources for each individual are known as a learning ecology. For me, these facets of learning have been wide and diverse, from more traditional forms and formats to unconventional ways of obtaining new information.
My primary source of learning for most of my life has been school. Certainly from preschool through middle school it was by far the most important facet of my earning. Obviously I also learned in other means, such as from my parents or from going out to museums or even just mindlessly googling things, but school always took the spotlight. From basic reading and writing, to math, writing, art, and lots more I probably just don’t remember, it seemed as though formal learning would take the center stage for learning my whole life. During this time discourses, or coordinations of things surrounding people, clarified my role in learning, as I wore a school uniform that differentiated me from the nicely dressed teachers to symbolize my lesser understanding. That all began to change once I started High School though. The couple of clubs I was in fostered my learning more than hardly any class through those four years. The pre-med club allowed my to visit cadaver labs, and learn more about the human body than any biology class would have taught. I began learning on my own terms, and that has completely shifted how I view learning.
New literacies, or more recent disciplines usually brought about due to the digital transformation of the world, have begun to dominate how I learn recently. I’ve begun to learn increasingly via social media, which requires a certain form of literacy to use them effectively and as intended, known as media literacy. With media literacy, you understand how to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act with media (Media Literacy Defined, 1) , especially new media such as social media. The ability to gain myriads of new knowledge in this very non-traditional format, watching videos and looking at posts uploaded by members of a certain community, for me usually weird history facts and their implications or new scientific discoveries. And even sometimes just learning about my favorite shows, sports, and videogames as well. Of course, you have to be able to analyze the content you consume in this manner for truth and biases, such as political bias in history videos, or a scientific video about climate change being advertised on by an oil company. The ability to create on these social media platforms is also key to how I learn on them, as posting articles onto different subreddits on reddit allows me to gain a deeper understanding of what I just read, and participating in the community as a whole is almost more informative than many classrooms settings I have been in. The participatory culture, or a culture surrounding media in which those who consume the media also have the opportunity and ability to create it, surrounding the social media I use allows for new methods of learning and understanding through a more hands-on way of informal learning.
Even now still though a good deal of the learning I do continues to come from a formal source, perhaps the most formal source, University. While I have learned countless fact from historical posts and videos, the certainty that what I learned is absolute fact is hard to come about, and does require a little bit of “diving down the rabbit hole” to ascertain, while the knowledge given by my professor about the world wars that he has studied and taught for most of his adult life is usually safe to trust is not going to be a lie, especially when the resources to study it confirms him. The informal learning I do I find is usually not all that helpful to finding a career path or building marketable skills, while the University learning I do most certainly does. So while there is much upside to informal learning, formal learning is still necessary to me.
Bibliography
“Media Literacy Defined.” National Association for Media Literacy Education, 10 Mar. 2017, namle.net/publications/media-literacy-definitions/.
