Journey Along MY Learning Path

Eating my Own Dogfood

In my last post, The Arcanum Begins, I talked about the company I cofounded this year. Well, I am also a customer. Yes I am Apprenticing within the Master Cohort of Robin Griggs Wood. More on that later. I've decided to chronicle and share my experience so you can have a better understanding and appreciation for this type of learning environment.

What's Level 3?

Within The Arcanum, we're taking a different approach to learning. Making it as personal as possible. Levels are grouped into Spheres. Today, there are 10 Levels per Sphere. The Levels are NOT curriculum. They are stepping stones toward your goal. I'm going to keep the mystery there for right now ;-) Check back in a week or so and I'll post more info about the Magical Learning Experience within The Arcanum!

Within The Arcanum, Level 3 is the first real opportunity to engage the community as part of the Leveling process. Don’t get me wrong, Levels 1 and 2 have been chock full of engagement, discussion, feedback and relationship building up to this point. But Level 3 is where the "rubber meets the road" so to speak.

Goal for Level 3

The challenge for Level 3 is seek assistance from your Apprentices within your Cohort, for help narrowing down from 10 to 5 images that will then be critiqued in Level 4. In addition, you must provide constructive feedback to your Fellow Apprentices. Here's my Level 3 Album.

The experience is a ton of fun! I raced through the Albums posted for Peer Review, so excited to see so many wonderful works. It was a challenge to _slow down_ and provide thoughtful, constructive, authentic feedback. While “Nice photo” or "Love it" is, well, nice....that isn't appropriate or enough for this experience. If that's all you put in, you won't get anything valuable in return.

The secondary purpose of this Level is to learn how to properly post albums, ask and give help through a peer review, learn to set up a G+ Hangout as part of the peer review. So yes - there is a fair amount of ”Learning The Arcanum” as well as Leveling up my skills.

Possible Down-side of Self-Paced Learning?

I got a late start into my Cohort and most or all of the Apprentices have already moved past Level 3. So I didn’t feel my comments and peer review were very helpful in terms helping them narrow down for their critique session. However, I do hope that my feedback was still worth something, another perspective perhaps?

Insight for Level 3

For this reason It’s critical to “Keep Up” with the group for these initial Levels. Otherwise you’re not taking advantage of the early phase of building essential relationships that create a network of support you need to move forward in The Arcanum.

Best Practice

Robin Griggs Wood is a world-class Mentor. One simple data point is that she *requires* us to spell out our specific goal for each image in any portfolio that which we ask for feedback and critique. She models brilliant behavior by always seeking to understand the goal of each work prior to offering any counsel. This exercise was incredible. Having to write the goal forced me to think about what images I wanted to include. Indeed, I wound up with a different set for the Peer Review because I was actually able to articulate the purpose behind the work. Check out the album and the comments here.

Energy and Inspiration

Holy COW!!! We completed the Peer Review and I was totally psyched to _go back and re-process_ some of my photos. I had a vision of how to improve them. Goosebumps took over my body. Will be working on the images this weekend!

Here's the recording of our Peer Review Hangout with @Christina Lihani and @Jacob Surland
Link to my Level 3 Album is also attached..Definitely check out the comments for Goals and feedback from my Fellow Apprentices

Can’t wait for my Level 4 Critique!!

#LEV3 #Level3

http://thearcanum.com/

Eating my own Dogfood