Module 01 – Lifelong Learning

Lifelong Learning is both an activity and a mindset. It can and should take place in both your professional and personal life.

7 1/2 Habits of Lifelong Learners

Lori Reed has put together a list of 7 1/2 Habits of Lifelong Learners that you can see in her slideshow. Here they are…

  1. Begin with the end in mind.
  2. Accept responsibility for your own learning.
  3. View problems as challenges.
  4. Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner.
  5. Create your own learning toolbox.
  6. Use technology to your advantage.
  7. Teach or mentor others.

Habit 7.5 is Play!

How I Use the Habits

Throughout my life, I have developed many of these habits, even though I didn’t necessarily have the end in mind for everything.

I’ve been an avid reader, even before the internet. When the www came into existence, I spent a lot of time looking up random information. With the advent of YouTube, I pushed my learning into videos as well. I have saved a lot of money by watching (and re-watching) others do repairs and then performing them myself.

One of the mindsets I teach my physics students is to view their homework as puzzles rather than problems.

Throughout my many years of teaching physics, I have looked for ways to improve my pedagogy. My love of computers has certainly helped in this. Some of my skills were picked up just by playing. I always thought it would be funny to have pictures with multiple copies of myself, so I got into photo editing. This has blossomed into vector drawing, which I use to make diagrams for my courses.

Lifelong Learning Reflection and Discovery

Having been through this course before, I was tempted to just talk about a tool that I already use. However, in the spirit of lifelong learning, I decided to look through the EmTech list of Lifelong Learning Resources. I ran into a website / software program that I think I’ll need to give a try…

Imaginary Teleprompter is a teleprompter that you can either download or use right from your browser. Folks use teleprompters to help them read while looking at a camera. Your local newscasters typically read the news off of the teleprompter. You’ve seen politicians reading from them as well.

Here’s a screen capture of the web-browser version in action.

Screen capture of the imaginary teleprompter.

When you start the teleprompter, the text scrolls slowly up the screen. The highlighted text is the piece that you read. I have the text size a little low, so two lines show up. The default settings only show one highlighted line at a time. I would put this screen at the top of my monitor under the camera so that I can read the script while going through a presentation. I’m sure I’ll need to figure out a way to show both the presentation and the teleprompter without recording the teleprompter.

With the COVID pandemic, I’ve started to make more and more videos. I found it distracting to try and talk to the camera while making screencasts. I think this should help me improve the professionalism of my videos, or at least stop me from rambling.

The full URL for Imaginary Teleprompter is https://imaginary.tech/teleprompter/


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