user generated learning

I really must start asking these guys for some cash.

mistakes & stories

Two Ning groups that you should all be looking at:

• The Mistake Bank: The Mistake Bank is a repository for "war stories," or brief narratives of mistakes that people would like to share. Please contribute videos or blog posts recounting your mistakes that you think others could learn from.
• Worldwide Story Work: If you care about story work in organisations please come and join us.

Thanks: Shawn

N.B. Ning doesn't seem to be very good at allowing you to merge accounts created with different email addresses. In fact, it's really bad at it.

sticky fingers

Just finished Sticky Knowledge by Gabriel Szulanski. It's a brief book written in a somewhat academic style but GS's point is both simple and powerful.

We often wonder why we can't get the one team/division/subsidiary that does something really, really good to show the other team/division/subsidiary how to do. There is a tendency to think that this main barrier is recipient motivation - "they just don't want to improve" - and that this barrier can be surmounted by tweaking incentives.

GS's research indicates that the main barrier in his examples was actually the absorptive capacity of the recipients - i.e. the people that need to learn don't know enough to take the new stuff on board. The knowledge jump is too great for them. The second barrier was causal ambiguity - i.e. we didn't understand what made the original good thing tick well enough to transport it lock stock & barrel.

So if we are going to learn from each other (generalisations ahoy):

• A little and often is better than all at once.
• We must be cautious of overconfidence in our preferred solution.
• Bribery may not help.

training management systems vs learning management systems

One familiar discussion/rant I get into with ABB concerns the difference between training management and learning management.

Training management operates at the level of courses (classroom or virtual), learners being another cog in the mechanism (along with content, budgets, schedules, performance agreements, etc). But whilst courses might train, they don't learn.

Learning management by its very nature works at the level of individual. Only I learn. But I do not learn in a vacuum. I learn with a context of others. My actual learning management system is a mix of blogs, wikis, RSS, books, coffee conversations, tags, networks, newspapers, magazine, drunken exchanges at bus stops, epiphanies whilst watching trash TV. I can (I have to) share some of it with you. But it eludes, evades, overwhelms a trad LMS. It is more like being washed away in the rip of a lifestream.

There is something inherently, annoyingly messy about learning. We need ways of making sense of it but any attempt to control it is doomed to fail.

This presentation by Stephen Downes says a lot of this (and much more) in a much prettier way.

second life (1): learning in context

So I was having a coffee with the ever-engaging Anne Bartlett-Bragg and we were talking about Second Life. Neither of us are fans (bah humbug) but ABB outlined an interesting experience she had whilst teaching a bunch tradespeople to be trainers. She tried her damnest to pitch the Web 2.0 stuff (blogs, wikis, tagging, etc) and got a big yawn. So she showed them SL and they loved it. What they used it for was quite specific.

The motor mechanics and hairdressers didn't want SL to teach their apprentices how to strip down an engine or apply highlights. You can only do that with real hair or a real engine. Instead it would allow them to teach customer interaction skills with real people in an environment with visual cues. Because the people are real (enough).

mummy, what is corporate learning?

Gav Heaton & Patrick Lambe have both drawn my attention to Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations. There are some good speakers and I'd recommend everyone to register now.

That'll learn ya (2): Kronberg is lovely at this time of year

Both Kim & Arthur have drawn my attention to the UNESCO Kronberg Declaration on the Future of Knowledge Acquisition and Sharing. Now there are more than enough motherhood & apple pie statements here to cause serious mental indigestion but I want to examine one key statement (with maybe others down the track):

The importance of the role of teachers as instructors will decrease, while their role as facilitators, consultants, guides and coaches for learners, as role models and as validators and interpreters of knowledge sharing, creation and acquisition, will increase

And with impeccable timing, James Farmer loses his rag in relation to an IFTF jolly the future of teaching:

Is suppose it’s inevitable that a room packed with futurists, bureaucrats and people who’ve done well out of social technologies would come up with this kind of definition, and if you’re going to call your seminar “The Future of Learning Agents” then this is the kind of guff that you’re going to expect.

Now let me stress that James is not having a go at Kronberg (although I'd like to know what he thinks about that as well). And let me also say that I am not a teacher (although I have been involved in corporate training) and I haven't been a student for a decade. With those caveats in place, let me move right on to the ill-informed generalisations:

• There are many different learning environments out there and they are all somewhat different: primary, secondary & tertiary education, vocational education & organisational training. For a learner to take responsibility for their own learning, they have to be able to take responsibility for stuff and getting a 5 year-old to take responsibility for a goldfish is tricky enough, let alone their future. Asking a 40 year-old corporate executive to do so is a different matter (just don't leave him alone with the goldfish).
• Many tertiary educators (& corporate trainers) would love to be collaborative learning agents, partnering on the great educational adventure with their students. Many of the students (tho not all) don't want this. They want the quickest route to the piece of paper at the end of the course. "Just gimme the course notes and don't make me think too much".
• There are two big trends in education: The first trend focuses on the standardisation & control that can be seen in development of national curricula on the one hand & competency-based LMS tools on the other. However, the individual does not learn in a "standard" way so this has triggered the second big trend - the focus on user-centred learning. Both of these views have some legitimacy but both by themselves are harmful. We need to build some kind of synthesis between these two approaches. Suggestions?

Ultimately I think that statement from Kronberg might be right. I would add that it's not just the teachers we need to change but their students / stakeholders as well (i.e. the rest of us). If we are all to become life-long learners (which I believe in the current, crazy world, we must), we must also become teachers (of others & also ourselves). Are we ready for that?

That'll learn ya

Luis Suarez has been writing about the fires on Gran Canaria, including heart-breaking pictures of the island before and after the fires. Luis writes about the application of social media

instead of just focusing on the corporate world, we would have KM and social
software focusing on what really matters: the day to day stuff that can affect
your own life (And that of your loved ones) and the environment for many years
to come

As always, Luis has a point. And for me the point is about awareness and action. People do something about an issue when it is real to them, when they are connected to it by images, words, sounds, conversations & relationships.

Which brings me to MentorNet. ABB gave us a demo of this today. Part of a program aimed at offering support for Australian businesswomen, it's a collaborative / personalised learning environment built on Atlassian's Confluence wiki product . The technology is wikis/blogs/tags/RSS (mashed up with Flickr & other stuff). But what's impressive is the simplicity with which it allows participants to collaborate with each other & to share images, words, sounds, conversations & relationships.

MentorNet is an example of a Learning Support Platform. There are surprisingly few of these around. Most Learning Management Systems are in fact Training Management Systems. Nothing wrong with this but they are about dispensing training courses rather than the individual & collective learning of people. That will change. It has to.