Portfolio sharing

So I am clearly the lucky one. I get to read all of the Global Ed baseline portfolios. For the most part, I’m blown away. I feel honored by what the students are sharing with me; delighted with the glimpses into each of their own ways of knowing and sense making. I feel privileged to be the one who gets to do this. But I also feel sad. I feel sad because I know that from what several of the students have said, that they are feeling connected and a growing sense of community. They are enjoying what they are building together and so my sadness is about that while I am the one that gets to collect in these samples of learning and special “aha moments” because I’m the teacher, it isn’t my intention to put myself at the center. Instead I would rather be finding ways to create or enhance a web and a network. The question is, how? How can I meet the requirements of assessment, keep myself in but not central to the emerging web, and help to support and foster the community that is developing through these or future portfolios?

Thinking about Fractals

I love the idea of shifting our thinking away from being strictly linear because the idea of embracing the complexity of fractals is a much more optimistic way of understanding the possibility of solutions to the complex and seemingly huge global problems we are currently facing. It not only suggests that the complexity of the problems can be broken down into similar but smaller, manageable problems, but that each of our own small steps to create solutions can in fact become part of the greater whole. To me this notion is quite uplifting.