Skills 2.0 is now part of this month’s Work/Learning Blog Carnival hosted by Manish Mohan.
My article in T&D, the journal of ASTD, was published this month, and if you’re a member of ASTD you’ll see it in the monthly journal or you can access it online. I’ve attached the article below.
This article covers issues that I often refer to on this blog and there is little new for regular readers. It is geared toward learning professionals who may want to know why it’s important to understand the Web for training and development.
Download PDF: L&D Skills 2.0
I submitted this post for the work/learning carnival because it synthesizes much of my writing about learning on the Web. The Web has changed the rules for teachers, educators, trainers and especially learners. How we react to this change is up to us.
Enabling learning is no longer about just disseminating good content, if it ever was. Enabling learning is about being a learner yourself, sharing your knowledge and enthusiasm and then taking a back seat. In a flattened learning system there are fewer experts and more fellow learners on paths that may cross. With practice, one can become a guide who has already walked a path. As fields of practice and bodies of knowledge expand, a challenge for learning professionals will be to change their tool sets from prescriptive to supportive.
Today I came across an excellent example of collaborative learning used by Ken Caroll in training language hosts:
At the moment, we’re in the process of inducting (training?) some new hosts for the podcast lessons – we’ll be launching FrenchPod and ItalianPod. Instead of simply telling them how to do that we’ve focused them on producing “artifacts”, that is samples of the lessons they eventually aspire to. We encourage participants to produce a much as possible – a lesson per day, for example. After that, we get together with them as well as practitioners of differing levels/experience, to reflect, discuss, and offer feedback.
The focus on doing has been literally very productive. Discussion are focused and concrete, the process of learning, visible. We blog as we go along, and we link to samples of the artifacts as we do so. We’ve also started recording the feedback sessions themselves and linking to those, too.
Thanks for sharing this Harold!
Loved the “flow” idea :)
I believe that sharing is usually the right thing to do with information.
It’s interesting that the Flow section didn’t make the final edit in the print copy.
«Being a learning professional in a Web 2.0 world is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.»
Wow! I like this one!
It reminds me of an important aspect of Otto Scharmer’s U-Process Theory: Learning from the future as it emerges.
Thank you Harold for this very good text!
It strikes me that your ASTD article takes connectivist theory and puts it into real life practice by explaining why connections trump information on a daily basis in the office! The article is full of great insights that help this along (“… in the knowledge economy … relationships are the currency”). I’m convinced that we will look back on this connectivist concept as one of real significance. You’ve just given me a number of ways to make it concrete – which proves the point of your article! (What a great time to be in the learnign business.)
Ken Carroll
“Who you know becomes as
important as what you know. Conversations help people make meaning and
the quality of our conversations is affected by the quality of our networks.”
Harold, I think this is a key aspect that must be discussed in greater detail. Just like for real physical wealth, in a knowledge economy, we must address the asymmetries by trying to make sure each learner has an equal opportunity to build the right quality of networks through a process of discovery and peer facilitation. Networks are only as good as the people that comprise them.
Today the amount of quality knowledge (even just through blogs) that is flowing around is also mind boggling. These factors enough to deter many people from being able to jump into a conversation in much the same way a student in a classroom is intimidated by the teacher.