Pathway Reflection
On this page you will find the following elements related to my life and learning pathway:
1) Life Update: a reflection on how my life circumstances have influenced my learning during this cycle.
2) Pathway Tracking: how this OP and the associated project work fit it with my original plans as outlined in my LIPD, and what changes were made to said plans.
3) Participation Records: description and evidence of the different ways I have been actively engaged in the Gaia U community during this OP cycle.
4) Project Integration: a reflection of where I am with my current projects, why I chose to engage with the projects I have for this OP, and how they are affect my learning pathway.
5) Skillflex Assessment: a mind map and assessment of the skills I’ve obtained during this cycle.
Life Update
The past few years have been a very creative period of my life — I built a house and created a home (where I will likely live for the rest of my life, if off and on), I created a family, and I created a business and a new livelihood. The principle patterns during this period have been settling down, putting down roots, establishing my territory, and honing in on my craft.
The dust has now begun to settle around this flurry of creation, which has felt at many times chaotic and stressful and full of uncertainty. Though plenty of uncertainty remains, especially around my business, in other ways I have gained a sense of security and place like I’ve never known. With this comes a deep sense of gratitude, and with gratitude joy.
It seems that things are now coalescing and a pattern of convergence is underway in my life. New opportunities are presenting themselves on the farm with potential partners, I have a clearer vision and direction with my Wired Roots business, and the addition to the house is finally finished. The pieces are largely in place, and now I sense a transition underway into a period of growth and optimization.
A primary focus in this transition, and not coincidentally this Output Packet, is growing my business Wired Roots. I want to make my work increasingly valuable so that I may 1) support my family in the way I’d like and allow my wife to make a professional transition, 2) create more time for myself to spend with my family (and working toward being in a position to homeschool my daughter), and 3) create time and surplus resources to invest in the farm.
With these goals firmly in mind, I am excited about what’s to come but I am also feeling a lot of pressure. One big one is my daughter’s education — the more I expand my own knowledge and experience in education, the stronger I feel about finding an alternative to the schools available to us here where we live. I’m confident in my ability to make that happen, but there is also a lot still up in the air.
Overall I am just very grateful for all the blessings I have been given. They give me a sense of awe, like I’m not entirely sure how I ever managed to get to where I am. Yet I try to balance this gratitude for the present with inspiration for what’s to come — there are so many incredible opportunities in front of me, a lot to be done and learned.
I created the above video to describe how I use Trello to manage my project and OP tasks (there is a watermark on the video because I am experimenting with the free version of a tool called Camtasia for making instructional videos).
Pathway Tracking, Managing Time & Promises
I have made quite a few significant changes to my plans since publishing my LIPD. Looking back at my original plan, I can see that I didn’t have a good idea about how I was going to grow my business. I see this now as a positive thing, because it shows me that I have learned a lot since then. I am grateful for the flexible structure of this program that allows me to reshape my plan as new understanding, insights and opportunities arise.
In my LIPD, I had envisioned creating a series of ‘micro-courses’ for my capstone OPs. These courses were going to largely be information-based. What has emerged for me, and what this OP is all about, is an emphasis away from info-dump courses and toward interactive, personalized and transformative learning experiences. As this awareness emerged, I had to take advantage of the opportunity to shift my focus to accommodate it.
I have also learned a ton about how to create premium online courses. I have engaged with several of the leaders in this space, read books, attended webinars, and have gained a much deeper understanding of how to approach it. This approach is more in line with the iterative, lean/agile design method that I have become interested in — rapid prototyping, generating continuous feedback, and not investing a bunch of energy into building out a fancy course until I have gone through a designed process of testing and validation. These were elements largely lacking in my original LIPD plans.
In my last meeting with my advisor Ariane, I stated my goal to run the pilot course I was planning before submitting OP3. That didn’t exactly happen as I was envisioning, as my strategy evolved to include an interactive guide and webinar to function as early prototypes before the pilot. I am now very close to being ready to launch the pilot, but as it will last 6 weeks I would have had to delay submitting this OP by at least a couple of months. This didn’t fit my goals for finishing up this degree program.
Another huge factor was that I was very busy doing work for Gaia U that was very relevant to the subject of this OP — specifically, building a new elearning website and creating a new introductory online course for all Gaia U associates.
Reflecting back to my vision for my pathway and my business as I began this capstone phase, it was always my intention to expand my freelance work before shifting too much into developing my own products. To do so, I needed 1) more experience and 2) a polished design portfolio demonstrating my work. As I was working on these other significant and relevant projects, I saw an opportunity to integrate them into this OP as well as creating a new portfolio for myself on my website.
All in all I feel these were good decisions and I am very pleased with the outcomes of this OP.
Participation Records
I have been actively involved in the Gaia University community during this OP cycle as both an associate and as a member of the Core Team. I was engaged in the following events during this cycle:
- Attended regular meetings with Gaia U co-founders Andrew Langford and Liora Adler, discussing various projects and evolving role.
Takeaways: working in my role as a consultant/designer, meeting clients’ needs, asking the right questions, making commitments and delivering.
Insights: Consulting is very much an art form, requiring balancing opposing views and creating space and support for clients to think well. Cannot look to control outcomes. Have to approach with a lot of respect even when you may disagree with client.
- Attended 5 monthly (Feb-June) 4-hour Core Team meetings where we discussed progress with various projects and work together to develop visions and action plans for the future.
Takeaways: working on a virtual team, experimenting with virtual meeting structures, tracking team tasks, creating accountability, group brainstorming, experimenting with decision-making processes (ex. Sociocracy).
Insights: Look for opportunities to minimize information transmissions during meetings — can offload to tools like Slack and Google Docs. Meetings are good places for dialogue which can produce emergent insights. Trello is great tool for tracking team tasks.
- Delivered my Middle-of-Phase presentation on 2/17/17.
Takeaways: designing and delivering online presentations, creating slides, rhythm and tone of speech.
Insights: often less is more — get into trouble when you try to pack in too much.
- Attended Gaia Radio AGC call on ‘Story Shifts: Using Personal and Collective Narratives to Co-Create’ with Rhonda Baird on 5/25/17.
Takeaways/Insights: Great call on a topic I’m very interested in. Was able to explore my own story a bit and get feedback on some of the major themes I identified in my personal narrative. Good group thinking around how narratives influence our behavior and how they can be transformed.
- Had main advisor session with Arian Burgess on 3/16/17.
Takeaways/Insights: talked through my OP2, identifying some key edges for improving my output, reflecting on some of the limitations of the Gaia U approach (a lot of feedback directed at the design process, less on the specific outcomes), and talked through my plans for this OP and my pathway in general. Set some new goals. Talking with Ariane always helps me to clarify my thinking and better prioritize next steps.
- Had Buddy Calls / Think & Listens with Liam McDermott on 5/29/17 and 6/23/17.
Takeaways/Insights: Liam is my former Advisor and now primary Gaia U buddy / think and listen partner as a fellow member of the Core Team. He’s always given me generous and thoughtful support for how my pathway is unfolding and good advice for where I might focus my energy and attention. Both of these meetings helped me to talk out my current thinking and receive feedback from Liam, related to both my MSc program and our work on the Core Team.
- Attended / facilitated development meetings for free Intro Course with Andrew Langford and Liam McDermott.
Takeaways/Insights: having to move quickly on this with a tight deadline, we found a good synergy among the 3 of us with a high degree of collective ability in design thinking and rapid prototyping to push this course through the process. Great practice for developing elearning with a short timeline and working with subject matter experts (SMEs) to deliver.
- Hosted a free webinar on Gaia Radio ‘7 Principles for Creating Transformative Virtual Learning Experiences’.
Takeaways/Insights: promoting webinars in social media groups (Facebook/LinkedIN), using webinar structure to test ideas and get feedback, developing my approach to learning experience design by sharing my thinking / model and generating feedback. The webinar went really well I thought — got good feedback and am making some adjustments now for my next one.
Skillflex Assessment
Personal
I became more disciplined during this cycle, waking up early and going through a morning routine each day that includes mental, physical and spiritual exercises to put myself into a good state for the day. This has had a noticeably positive effect on my work, my health, my relationships and my quality of life in general.
This is something I had mentioned in my LIPD as a key edge for me and I’m quite pleased with my progress, though there is plenty of room for improvement. My personal health is very connected to my ability to execute in my project work as well as my ability to think well.
Goals moving forward:
- Continue to fine-tune my system for steady progress
- Incorporate more physical exercise
Professional
This OP and this degree pathway in general is very focused on creating regenerative livelihood and developing my professional skills and experiences. I made good progress during this cycle by adding many valuable skills with tools for creating elearning content, building websites, setting up learning management systems, understanding many theories related to learning experience design, and skills related to entrepreneurship (especially creating an online business).
My LIPD was very focused on my professional development and many skills have emerged for me since then as I study and my awareness expands. As my projects are largely centered around becoming a professional learning experience designer and building a business in that industry, these skills are fundamental to doing so.
Goals moving forward:
- Practice, practice, practice!
- Build my pilot course
- Host a series of webinars for course
- Experiment with different tools and media
- Continue to build out my elearning portfolio and get freelance jobs
Peer
The projects documented in this OP related to Gaia U — specifically, the new website/elearning platform and the intro course gave me a great opportunity to capture some collaborative action learning within the Output Packet container. Many of my past OPs lacked collaboration with my projects, and were heavily weighted toward solo work. Here I got to practice and reflect on working with clients and working on small virtual teams. I also grew in my role within the Gaia U learning community, and became more active within other online communities of practice such as in social media groups.
I had some awareness about the importance of building networking skills during my LIPD, and this has only become more important since then. I have come to understand the design process as a series of interactions more than a visionary locked away creating a masterpiece. As a designer, I recognize the importance of building strong inter/intrapersonal skills and cultivate a strong and vibrant network of stakeholders.
Goals moving forward:
- Make this a primary focus for OP4 on Organization Development
- Becoming more proactive in expanding my personal and professional network
Political/Patrix
My projects for this cycle were all situated strategically from a patrix-busting lens. In particular, my research and reflection on the role of story/narrative in learning experience led to some insights related to this topic — I now see the ‘patrix’ as a dominant narrative, and the primary question becomes: how are narratives best transformed? This is a central question to my pathway and my work.
I had set goals for deepening my understanding of certain political ideologies in my LIPD, and I can see how this edge has evolved through my work. Personally, I am less interested in promoting a particular ideology and more interested in helping people improve how they think, learn and co-create new narratives. My view is that solutions arise out of this process, and are highly specific to context — from my view, investing my energy into helping others improve the process is an intervention with extremely high leverage.
Goals moving forward:
- Deepen my understanding of narrative
- Connect to Organization Development in OP4