As education becomes increasingly complex, effective continuing professional learning is an important strategy to support teachers in schools. However, current professional development approaches may not meet contemporary teachers’ needs. Seeking to enhance teachers’ professional learning opportunities, this paper presents a model of learning as a connected professional. The model draws upon the findings of a qualitative case study of 13 teachers who interact with others through a personal learning network (PLN). Theories of connectivism, networked learning, and connected learning underpin the model, which conceptualises the whole experience of learning as a connected professional. The model comprises three elements: arenas of learning, teacher as learner, and PLN. Key characteristics of the experience are practices described as linking, stretching, and amplifying. These practices recur in various ways across all three elements of the model. The model promotes professional learning that is active, interest-driven, and autonomous, meeting personal learning needs while being socially connected. As education becomes increasingly complex, effective continuing professional learning is an important strategy to support teachers in schools. However, current professional development approaches may not meet contemporary teachers’ needs. Seeking to enhance teachers’ professional learning opportunities, this paper presents a model of learning as a connected professional. The model draws upon the findings of a qualitative case study of 13 teachers who interact with others through a personal learning network (PLN). Theories of connectivism, networked learning, and connected learning underpin the model, which conceptualises the whole experience of learning as a connected professional. The model comprises three elements: arenas of learning, teacher as learner, and PLN. Key characteristics of the experience are practices described as linking, stretching, and amplifying. These practices recur in various ways across all three elements of the model. The model promotes professional learning that is active, interest-driven, and autonomous, meeting personal learning needs while being socially connected.
Christopher de Hamel grew up in Dunedin, New Zealand, where the modest illuminated manuscript holdings of the Dunedin Public Library stimulated a teenager's interest in the subject. He later gained an Oxford doctorate and then became the expert on medieval manuscripts at Sotheby's in London. De Hamel is now the Librarian at the Matthew Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, which provides one of the 12 manuscripts that form the core of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts. De Hamel examines 12 important illuminated medieval manuscripts held in northern hemisphere's libraries for what he terms, 'a series of celebrity interviews'. Colour illustrations supplement de Hamel's engrossing descriptions of the history and provenance of the manuscripts, the libraries he visited and librarians he met. De Hamel notes that 'intrinsic beauty is a difficult conception in art history' but his 12 manuscripts, ranging in date from the fifth to the sixteenth century, certainly fit that description. He begins with his own College's St Augustine Gospels, 'the oldest non-archaeological artefact of any kind to have survived in England'. This sixth century Italian manuscript reputedly accompanied St Augustine on his mission on behalf of Pope Gregory the Great in 597 to convert the English to Christianity. It was donated to Corpus Christi in 1575 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. On a personal note, de Hamel details his anxieties on the transportation of the Gospels to a Westminster Abbey service in 2010, where he held open the Gospels for Pope Benedictine the Sixteenth. He was particularly alarmed when the Dean 'censed the altar, endlessly waving the smoking thurible, back and forth over the open manuscript and I wondered what I would do if I saw a crumb of smouldering charcoal landing on the parchment'. De Hamel observes that 'for a true scholar, no one can properly know about a manuscript without having seen it and held in the hands'. Yet, he later acknowledges that many of the world's great illuminated manuscripts are already practically inaccessible.
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