Self-directed learning

Hey y'all!Yes, I said y'all. And you can't do a thing about it. 

The article I read for this assignment was called "Preparing Students to Learn Without Us," by Will Richardson. It described self-directed learning and how it can work its way into the classrooms. What it came down to was this; self-directed learning is the student finding their own way to meet the school's set goals, where they can learn about what they want and learn it the way they want to learn it, and teachers can play a big role in bringing this about and guiding the students through the process.  One quote that stuck out at me from the article was this:"The ability to learn what we want, when we want, with whomever we want as long as we have access creates a huge push against a system of education steeped in time-and-place learning." Self-directed learning will be difficult to institute in most schools because it is so out-of-the-box and unorthodox; however, sometimes, breaking tradition is necessary for important change. Overall, I think self-directed learning, like socialism and bacon chocolate, is a fantastic idea in theory, but it will be extremely difficult to make it work in reality. Students may take advantage of the lax structure and do absolutely nothing, and some children may not get where they need to be in the appointed guidelines; however, I think the principals of self-directed learning are important, since each child has his or her own learning styles. Structure is important, but too much structure can make things oppressive and boring. In our class, I think that sticking to the curriculum with one or two self-directed learning projects on the side is a good compromise, and one that could be effective for this year.One of the problems that I have with self-directed learning is that it would and will be very difficult for me to choose a topic, but I think I might be interested in the actual editing of video, since I know very little about htat. I would also be interested in the history and evolution of film-making. 

Diigo annotated page link: http://diigo.com/0sy20

(This post's formatting might be a little strange, but I can't figure out how to fix it. I apologize wholeheartedly)