Sarah Higgs-James
An Online Portfolio
The most challenging part of goal setting, for me, is finding my end goal. Vishen Lakhiani attributes this to confusion between means goals and end goals. He goes on to present the three questions he believes defines goal setting: (1) What experiences do you want from life? (2) How do you want to grow? And (3) How do you want to contribute to the world? (Lakhiani, 2014). When I think about my own goals, I ask myself those same questions. In this essay, I will compare the goals I set when undertaking the Master’s of Arts in Educational technology at Michigan State University with my current goals and discuss how they have changed and remained the same.
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Capstone Essays
When I think about my goals, I first let my imagination run wild. Once I have an ideal, I balance it with my reality. A large part of that balance is planning. It is easy to say that in five years I want to have a settled life in the UK with my husband and young family and a satisfying job in education with plans to expand my private educational consultancy. But life is not an equation that balances perfectly, that is equal on both sides. Life is a balancing act more like a game of KerPlunk, with a bunch of sticks tangled across each other holding up a load of marbles. In orderto win this epic game of KerPlunk, I must have more than future goals in mind; I need a plan to achieve them. In
I conclude this balancing act with reference to Man on Wire, a docudrama in which Philippe Petit illegally tightrope walks between the Twin Towers in 1974. He was arrested, but was truly a master of planning and balance. His story is inspiring and although I am talking about a different kind of balance in my life, I often feel like how I imagine Philippe might if he were playing a game of Kerplunk.
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You know that feeling? My husband calls it a velvet rut. It is so easy just to keep doing what you are doing, wiggling deeper into the comfort of the velvet rut. I live my life to stay out of that rut. The last time I found myself in a velvet rut, I sold or gave away everything I owned and moved to South Korea for three years. It was there that I started my education career, in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). Since then, I have traveled to almost 20 countries in Europe and Asia, and taught in 4 of them. But about three years ago, I found myself digging again, the velvet rut of life as an expat in TESOL. But this time moving to another country wasn’t going to be enough. I was remixing a video for a colleague of mine when it hit me, “Do your Master’s in some kind of technology!” So I set about looking at universities and programs and, after about 3 months of deliberation, I decided on a Master’s of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET) at Michigan State University (MSU). Looking back on my experience as a MAET cohort, I know I made the right choice. Through ReThinking Education, RePurposing Courses and ReImagining my Life, my experience as a MAET cohort at MSU have enabled me to ReMix anything, in both my professional and personal lives.
Remixing is not a key concept in the MAET program; however, it is definitely something that I take away from my experiences. Remixing involves combining two different things into one new thing. This can apply to media, but it can also apply to my professional and personal lives. My experience as a MAET cohort has shown me that I can combine my experience in the TESOL field with any other field of education to remix the perfect job for myself or remix tasks in any job I might take in the future. I am no longer bound by seeing things for what they are. The same goes for my personal life. I feel so empowered by the possibilities afforded to me by learning something so simple. If I am not satisfied with the way something is, remix it! My experience as a MAET cohort has given me the insight to remix tasks in all facet of my life because I am better equipped to ReThink, RePurpose and ReImagine anything.
I say good bye to the velvet rut forever!
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this essay, I attempt to balance my future goals and establish a basic plan for achieving them by sharing a few resources that would put me in the right direction.