Week 2 Weekly Report and Reflection

Graham Atwell defines a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) as an approach to using new tools for learning. To create an effective PLE, one must go through a series of 4 steps in order to make it as useful as possible. This blog post will go through those steps and apply them to myself.

Personal

Biderman, A. (CC) 2013 - PLE

In 5-10 years I would love to be working in the sports industry, being a player agent for one of the 4 major professional sports in North America. To do this, however, I would most likely need to graduate from Law school so that I would be fully qualified to understand the contract language, and more importantly, learn how to negotiate a contract better. I would also love to work for an already established firm, so that I could get my feet wet first an
d learn the business (along with gaining clients) before branching off into my own agency.

Right now, I am a 3rd year Sport Management student at Brock University. In order to achieve my goal, I have to first graduate from Brock, before applying to, and attending a law school. There are a lot of steps ahead of me in order to achieve my end goal, but I am on the right track now.

Learning

As I said above, in order to become a player agent, I must gain negotiating, and contract writing skills which are essentially only attainable through law school. In order to learn the way I need to I would need to use tools in the gathering information category in order to gain the information and knowledge that I would need to succeed in school, and then in my career. I would also need to use networking tools in order to make the connections necessary to get my foot in the door of the sport agency industry. Lastly I would need to use computer applications in order to do my work as effectively as possible both in school and in the business world.

Environment

I believe the quality of the environment that you work in is very much related to the quality of the work you produce. With that being said, I believe that working in a clean, uncluttered environment is conducive to doing your best possible work. I also think that the people that you associate with either helps or hinders the quality of work that you put out, so making sure that you work with people with a high work ethic is key to success. Knowing all of this I would want to make sure I work with more dedicated people and in an uncluttered working environment.

Habits

Getting rid of your old habits and replacing them with good ones is one of the biggest keys to improving upon your learning ability. One bad habit that I am trying to rid myself of is procrastination. I normally like to put things off to the last minute, but during the next 30 days I am trying to make sure I get my work done well in advance so I have time to improve it, and produce the best quality of work possible.


Reflection

Biderman, A. (CC) 2013 - Word Cloud

While creating my PLE, I learned a number of different things. The most important of them being that there are just so many different tools, and ways of learning that everyone's PLE would be different. I also learned that while I use everything for one task (gaining knowledge) there are a number of different avenues to gain that knowledge, and a number of other tools that help you do just that.

Making a word cloud for my Week 1 reflection post reminded me of the important of a digital footprint (as those are the two most prominent words). When creating a digital footprint one has to be careful of what they put out there and I believe those themes are evident in my Word Cloud.