Harold Jarche

Meredith Farkas has created Five Weeks to a Social Library, a site that includes many knowledge artifacts from a well-structured online course. The material is not just for librarians, with an outline that looks like this:

Introduction
Week 1: Blogs
Week 2: RSS & Social Bookmarking
Week 3: Wikis
Week 4: Social Networking, Flickr & MMOGs
Week 5: Selling Social Software
Final Project
Successful Completion List

The structure is similar to the informl learning unworkshops we conducted last year, but what I really like about this site are links to the participants, their blogs and their final projects, so you can follow the learning process. The site is built on Drupal, an excellent system for multi-user blogs and community resources.

Note that Week 1 covers blogs, which I have come to see as the primary building blocks for the social web. One reason that blogs are so persistent is because they are personal, and owners take pride in their maintenance.

Blogs are great for conversations, but often fall off the radar screen when they go beyond the first page and are left dangling.

One of the older conversations here is about Aliant’s connection speed. I had some woes with my ISP, which were finally addressed after a year of complaints and figuring out if anyone else had similar problems. My recent problems with Skype (last post) may be related to my ISP and it seeems that others have problems with Aliant’s service, namely that XBox live doesn’t work with their fastest service.

The homework question has garnered a lot of comments, as had earlier posts on homeschooling. Most of us have gone though the public education system and many have an opinion. I have come to believe that the core of the problem is an education system that was created for very different reasons than what we need today. Many “educational” activities are ineffective or counter-productive to learning, yet they continue based on tradition instead of sound science. If the evidence shows that an activity has little purpose, then we should abandon it. Homework is only one activity that lacks evidence to support its continuance. Subject-based curriculum, age-based cohorts and reliance on unsound models like Bloom’s Taxonomy to prescribe learning activities are other examples. This conversation on homework has been picked up in the community and we may even have a radio spot in the near future.

There also have been some comments to an older post on Education’s Three Conflicting Pillars. It’s great to see new discussion after several months of quiet, which is why I keep comments open.

This week there were some updates to the state of the NB elearning industry, thanks to Ben. Companies come and companies go, but many of us choose to stay. I’m on my third business card since I retired from the Army in 1998.

Finally, I’d like to quote Shawn, at Anecdote, on the importance of conversation, “… most learning comes through interacting with people. Learning richness increases as multiple perspectives are described, discussed, challenged and explored.“

Jay Cross refers to the March Issue of CGI Technology Viewpoints, which covers this Canadian company’s experience in implementing informal learning practices. CGI is discussed in detail in Jay’s book.

This is a good reminder for the naysayers (it can’t be done here) to see what a large corporation can actuallly implement. Here is CGI’s “bottom line” on informal learning:

1. When creating an environment that blends a rich mixture of available technologies to drive optimal collaboration, organizations don’t need to invent anything fundamentally new.
   
2. Be creative, taking advantage of what’s already in place within the enterprise, and look at open source options as an inexpensive but viable way to build a robust collaboration infrastructure.
3. Collaboration doesn’t require a large systems integration exercise when you leverage what’s already readily available and proven.

Imagine walking into a cocktail party that has been going on for a few hours and jumping in to the conversation. Blogs are like that. They flow along and different people join in the conversation from time to time. I monitor about 150 blogs and even if I don’t read each post, I have a general idea of what’s flowing by, so that I can jump in when I feel like it.

Behind most blogs lies the story of the writer and the community.  Shawn, at Anecdote, has this to say about stories, “Stories only have meaning in the context of their telling. That is, you need to tell and listen to stories to transfer (not capture) tacitly held knowledge. It’s a social process. You need to be part of the conversation.”

To use blogs for learning effectively, you have to jump in and go with the flow for a while. Understanding what is behind the writing as well as the conversations around each post then gives the necessary context.  Learning with blogs isn’t just about finding a useful fact here or there, but more of engaging in multiple stories that flow by, sometimes mixing and other times diverging. Following these flows is an acquired skill. It’s a meta-learning skill for the internet age that just might be worth developing. Jumping in is the first step.