Just last week, after three months of work, I completed my very first knitting project: a frayed baby blanket that was a journey involving many stops and starts, a few more balls of yarn than anticipated, and a great reflection upon how I learn. As a beginning knitting student, learning to hold the needles was laborious and I was convinced there was something wrong with my dexterity, particularly since others encouraged me with "It will get easier!" I often found myself making comments to the knitting experts such as “You’re so fast!” and “How long did it take to do that?”—the very comments posed to me while teaching technology-based workshops. Although my "knitting as learning" metaphor may seem a bit clichéd, my experience as a vulnerable learner was profound and instilled in me a renewed sense of patience and inspiration. In fact, my overall experience in learning to knit—which ultimately did improve, albeit at a tortoise-like pace—exposed me to some key lessons applicable to any adult learning experience.

I like watching certain TV programs with the captions on, which strikes non-family members as odd. After all, I’m not hard of hearing, I don’t have an auditory processing disorder, and English is my native language. But I did grow up in an immigrant household where my parents relied on captions to understand what was going on while they watched TV. I didn’t need captions the way my parents did, but they added to my enjoyment of television shows by turning them into animated books. I loved to see the words on the screen; to me, they offered a typographic translation of the sound. My relationship with television evolved into something not only visual and auditory, but also textual. It turns out that I’m not alone in this among so-called “normal” people.

In the December 10th, 2007, issue of the New Yorker (it takes me a few months to catch up these days), Atul Gawande wrote an eye-opening piece, “The Checklist.” The article describes how the implementation of a simple medical checklist, developed by Dr. Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins Medical Center, slashed the rate of oftentimes-lethal intravenous catheter infections for patients in intensive care units in the state of Michigan. How? By including simple, no-brainer steps like “Step One: Doctors must wash their hands with soap” that doctors and hospital staff were skipping, thus causing easily preventable deaths and infections in their intensive care units.

A friend sent me a link to a great twenty-minute speech by Stanford University Professor of Law Larry Lessig. The speech, “How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law”, was filmed in March at the TED Conference but was posted just last month at the TED site. I’m posting it a bit late by blogging standards, but it’s a “better late than never” type of thing. It’s a must-see. A twenty-minute cultural moment, like Scorsese’s homage to Hitchcock.And even though many of you have seen this much-forwarded video already, I believe that Larry Lessig deserves as much bandwidth as possible. You won’t be disappointed with this presentation. Lessig is an incredibly engaging speaker who has gained a reputation of being quite a PowerPoint virtuouso. He’s passionate, incredibly brainy, and skilled at making an issue sound extremely pressing. Lessig gives a forceful speech about on how in our Internet-driven age, overly-restrictive control of copyright will truly stifle and stagnate creative expression in the youth today. Youth not only speak in a different way, but create and distribute knowledge in a completely different format. The older generation (music and movie execs included) need to stop and listen.

The Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR) recently released its fourth annual research study on the role of technology in student life, which describes their findings of the ways college students use technology and the impact this may have on instruction. In case you don’t want to leaf through the 122-page PDF, you can read Andy Guess’s article in Inside Higher Education for an excellent analysis of the study. But the ECAR report is well worth reading. The tables and stats alone will come in handy for you to whip out at any cocktail party when the discussion turns to “these kids today”.