i learned a new word last monday and since then i have been smitten and giddy with self-awareness and relvelation. I am huetagogynous!… I learned the word, huetagogy, from my friend Bill. I had always thought that in spite of my boring high school experience, my Bard education had taught me to think and to write… and to learn. I felt like “a life long learner” – self-directed and motivated to learn what i needed to know, when in needed, and how i needed it. That is how i have proceeded through life since college. I taught myself to be a Spanish translator. I taught myself desktop publishing. I taught myself graphic design. I taught myself instructional design. I taught myself online instructional design…part intuition, part being genetically blessed, and part knowing how to learn stuff has resulted in who i am today, what i know, and how i apply stuff to keep learning about what interests me.So…my insatiable desire to beta test stuff… the millions of accounts on every social networking and web2.0 site… my unerring ability to sniff out the latest widget… I am not a geek, i am not a technophile, i do not burn to write code… i don’t even have a cell phone. But i am driven to do whatever it takes and learn what ever i need to to accomplish whatever i need to for a particular purpose. Most recently i have been playing with seesmic… in beta. quite a tool for asynchronous audio/video disucssion. very cool. Developing learning skills in the learner is characterized by John Anderson as “in pedagogy, what is to be learnt, and how, is both determined and directed by the teacher; in andragogy, it is determined by the teacher and directed by the learner; in heutagogy, both determination and direction shift to the learner.” I am hetagogynous… i like having that label and self-awareness.