If this portfolio is my educational autobiography, then it is also a work in progress, forever unfinished.  An educated life is one always in formation.  In looking back at my goals from the start of my master’s program, I am reminded of how much can change in unexpected ways and in a short amount of time.  As I look ahead to life after this program, I see many possible destinations, a variety of which exist thanks only to technology.

 

My gratitude to technology for the opportunities in my educational future is a new concept.  I entered this program as an educational technology skeptic, though never a Luddite.  I use technology regularly in my work and leisure, but I believe in pencil and paper for children in the classroom.  I worry about the impact of our ever-present, always-on screens on our children, for their cognitive, intellectual, emotional, and social development. This program has reinforced those concerns in many ways, but it has also awakened me to the fact that, as an educator, I have all the more reason to explore the affordances of technology to ensure its appropriate and most productive use.

 

In his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, Steve Jobs invoked the back cover of the Whole Earth Catalog’s last edition where Stewart Brand had written, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”  It became a sort of motto for Jobs; one he encouraged the Stanford graduates to follow.  He explained that they could not “connect the dots” to plot their futures by looking ahead, but that, by doing what they love, they will connect the dots when looking back.  That country road on the Whole Earth Catalog’s back page has no visible end.  We travel our educational roads, never exactly sure where they might lead, eager to discover what lies around the next bend.  I don’t know exactly where my path leads, but I love what I do.  The technological tools at my disposal embolden me to take some risks and innovate with trust that I will be able to connect the dots when I turn to look back down the road.

 

 

Where might my path lead?  With a young family, I must be willing to go with the flow.  I had thought I would move from the MSU MAED to UCLA Extension’s online certificate program in college counseling.  After 8 years of college counseling under my belt, that seems redundant now.  Instead, I am considering ways I might pursue my other passions.  Someday, I might like to pursue a doctoral program to research my concerns about technology’s impact on children’s learning.  Michigan State University's hybrid Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology appeals to me, but my family deserves a break from my formal schooling.  In the meantime, I will use the technological learning society I have discovered and become an educational hacker. 

 

Now that I have learned to create online content, I might join the Web 2.0 and start a professional blog, where I can share with my professional network my thoughts on trends in college admissions. I will use my new media literacies to grow my personal learning network through social media to stay abreast of those trends and communicate them to a broad audience.  Maintaining an online presence and sharing what I learn from my daily practice will exercise an important component of career development, which I learned from the case studies of a teacher, a First Lady, and a doctor, among others. 

 

Kindergarten teacher, Vivian Gussin Paley, conducted teacher research through daily reflective journaling.  The introverted Eleanor Roosevelt maintained a daily newspaper column, My Day, boldly expressing her opinions on a variety of controversial topics.  Danielle Ofri, a medical doctor and teacher, requires her residents to recite poetry during rounds, which she believes sharpens what Rita Charon calls "narrative competence" as a means of connecting more effectively with their patients.  The sharing of self-reflection, I have discovered through my examination of these professional case studies and analysis of children’s literature, is an important component of professional development.  Even the study of literature is incomplete without the discussion of it with other readers who enrich a text through their own perspectives and interpretations.

 

Many of the biographies I have studied in this program demonstrate that the best learning often happens outside of the traditional classroom. My own graduate experience is an example of the affordances of technology, with an online delivery that met my needs as a working mother. While my skepticism about the benefits of “educational” apps and digital games for young learners remains, I now see the endless opportunities technology offers to expand my learning.  So, on this road to who-knows-where, there will be plenty of pit stops for TED Talks, MOOCs, You Tube instructional videos, Twitter feeds, blogs, podcasts, and digitally-archived scholarly articles.  I will heed Steward Brand’s advice to stay hungry and foolish, but my finger still hovers over his “not-so-fast button.”