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…
- Begin with the end in mind.
- Accept responsibility for your own learning.
- View problems as challenges.
- Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner.
- Create your own learning toolbox.
- Use technology to your advantage.
- 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.
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/