One of the problems I’m seeing is that it can be discouraging to see a year later that I haven’t completed many of my goals. One of the site founders set a goal this year to reduce his 43 things to fewer than 20, just to make it more manageable. I look through my list and see many that are important to me, but I basically know they’re not going to happen any time soon. A learning moment, perhaps.

The other issue I’ve seen is that after an initial flurry of activity, I stopped coming back. Even though I loved the site, and had RSS feeds pulling me in occasionally, I didn’t return often through the first year. It’s not that I don’t care about the goals, but I only have so much attention to go around.

I too struggled a bit with what to post as goals, the more concrete ones tend to be physical challenges or far fetched dreams, and then vague things like “make a difference”. I suppose something could be created as a guide for formulating goals, with some linked examples? Again, alot goes into how serious one is aboutn using this for more than play (and play IS okay)

If I ever stop following rabbit trails and mucking around with questions of what constitutes “real learning”, I think this is probably my research question boiled down to its essence!

I know from personal experience that it can be useful in much the same way blogs are useful, but the additional structure and sense of connectedness has some benefits. One of my early goals was “get involved in local politics“, which was probably too vague to be of much value, but around the same time, someone else adopted the same goal and posted about the community blog she had set up. Suddenly I had my own model for action! So I set up my own version, which I’ve since donated to the community group that formed around it.

It’s an interesting network in that it’s very wide and not too deep…although perhaps just deep enough to get you sent off in the right direction. In the learning goals I’m looking at, I’m seeing that people aren’t going to use the site to actually learn how to code Perl (for example), but it does help them figure out whether they should be learning it in the first place…and people who have done it may offer alternative suggestions if they don’t recommend pursuing the goal.