Affecting other learners

What effect do you have on the readers of your blog? What other ways could you affect them? What effect does it have to think of yourself as a learner like the rest of us? How might other learners affected by your thinking "you're not a learner: you're an expert, author or professor?"

These are questions about affecting other learners. The effects you're having on learners is something that can be learned, but cannot be taught to you. These effects have to be discovered for yourself. If you're a totally free range learner, that's all I need to say. You can take it from here and discover answers to every question about the effects you have on other learners.

If you're like me, you experience value in the combination of structure and personal freedom. I like guides on the side of my own exploration. I have many uses for frameworks to organize my discoveries. I don't need to be told what to think, but it helps to be given structures to think with. I am more likely to uncover what effects I am having on other learners if I have some ideas about what I'm looking for and how to discern what I find. Frameworks even help me formulate better questions for my own explorations.

Here's the first of many frameworks for discerning our effects on other learners. This one is the most straightforward. It deals with the most immediate effects on learning. This framework raises many questions.

Effect on curiosity: After we say or do anything, other learners will be more or less curious. We can feed or starve their sense of wonder and fascination. They will show signs of inquisitiveness or boredom. We can make their future seem like a mystery or the same old story.

Effect on self confidence: Our conduct can change how powerful other learners feel. What we say can increase their sense of efficacy, validity and self respect or diminish all that. Other learners will end up feeling more resourceful or more insecure. We can strengthen or weaken their capacity for feedback, criticism and contradictory outlooks.

Effect on self motivation: The way we come across can free people from seeking approval or make them more needy, dependent and reactive to dispproval. We can restore their intrinsic motivation or dismiss their need to be inspired. They will show signs of doing their own thing with satisfaction or playing our game out of desperation.

Effect on creativity: Whatever we say and do can either inspire variety or conformity. We give permission to deviate or threaten penalities to eliminate disagreement. We make it seem right to play with the meaning they create or right to play by the rules, established evidence and verified facts. We allow inventiveness or require adherence.

Having said all this, I'm now full of wonder about the effect that reading this had on your curiosity. I'm confident I can use what contradicts my understanding and wonder how resourceful you're feeling too. I'm curious how your motivation has been affected too. I wonder how creative you'll be about learning from this, making your own sense of it and inventing a personal approach to discovering the effects you're having on other learners.

Technorati tags: discovery learning, effectiveness, creativity, side effects