Future as a Learner
“All the world is my school and all humanity is my teacher.”
― George Whitman
I’ve always been interested in the world that I live in, and I have consciously made efforts to expand my understanding of how the world works. The efforts have provided significant returns as new knowledge has been learned, mastery achieved, and as a synthesis of mastered subjects had been explored. I believe that I am a product of my environment. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is wondrous and beautiful, however, it is a difficult place to live without certain skills. I had understood early that along with a regular career a person may also need to be a plumber, electrician, mechanic, and builder. If the drain field goes down, grab a shovel, if the deep well is broken it is your duty to fix it. Overrr the years I have swapped engines, assembled computers, built a windmill, created a biodiesel processor, and constructed buildings from the ground up. In addition, I have taken trees from the forest and processed them every step of the way to create finished furniture. The life of a northern man demands such varied expertise. There was an understanding of those demands as a youth and there remains to be a continued understanding throughout pursuit of higher education as an adult. Although, I will be graduating soon, one major chapter of my education has come to an end.
More recently I have been working on assembling and organizing resources for managing various local areas that concern me, such as the local whitefish supply chain, the Tahquamenon watershed, management of a chamber of commerce, and the creation of an ag certificate program. I have turned to the use of the mindmap as a means to define these organizational structures, define values, develop processes, plan actions, and implement evaluations. Creating mind maps are part of the plan to help keep me focused in the future as a learner. The beautiful part of creating the mind maps is that it allows me to bulk research and to pin documents, presentations, charts, or pictures to the nodes of the map. Having the data pinned to a location on the map allows for the reading of the information as it becomes part of an area where I need to focus. The maps allow the ability to focus on specific data while keeping goals in mind. I look forward to staging several projects that are very sophisticated over the course of these upcoming years. The topics of the projects may be ones in which I am familiar with and others that I need to bring in outside resources. For projects that I need to bring in outside resources I could have an opportunity to talk point by point on subjects that I have created in my maps. I would then be able to fill in some of my gaps with expertise from collegues to aid in the enhancement of my learning goals.
The power of creating a mindmap is that it allows for others to collaborate on my learning goals, to give them a chance to argue with concepts, and to create ideas specific to the subject of interest. Beyond that, I want to include in my lifelong learning goals the ability to leave what I have learned along with a methodology for the next generation. There is an understanding that life will transition as time goes on and that it may be wasteful to let mastery go unrecorded. By leaving a specific document of the things that I have learned over my career, it will empower others to pick up wherever I leave off and be able to have their questions to why things were a certain way left recorded. The “living document” will allow them to bring in new knowledge and know that it is new and has a potential for implementation. Lifelong learning for me mostly means having the skills, abilities, and confidence to do what I want to do, which is to be a northern man, living and thriving in the beautiful woods and waters of the Upper Peninsula.
Feeding the Fire: the practice of lifelong learning
By Larry Jacques
My personal journey as a lifelong learner is as you would guess far from over. Education is like light from the firepit at night. The light cast by a beginning fire is small like a pinpoint and we can imagine that our understanding of what can be known is defined by the edge of that light. As the flame is fed (with education), the light eventually grows, and your surroundings become more visible and understandable. However, at the same time you notice that the circumference of the surrounding dark has also increased. If we want to see further, the only answer is to continue to fuel the fire. This is my mission, to continue to fuel the fire, and to see further than I could before. The desire to do so is in who I am, it defines me, and I cannot turn away. However, post graduation a lot of things will be changing as I transition away from academics and focus my efforts in some sort of real world application. I welcome the change, but I expect to be absorbing information in a more hands on type of way. In keeping order with the fire analogy, this transition could be considered changing the type of wood.