Tony Karrer has an excellent post on the implications of the long tail on organisational learning and compares training organisations to publishers. The challenge is not having enough stuff to distribute, it’s getting attention at the receiving end. He finishes by asking these questions:

• How do we get into the attention economy business?
• How do we dramatically lower production and delivery costs?
• How do we support self-service learning and user generated content?
• How do we foster knowledge worker skills?
• What are the new metrics?
• What does this mean for our current learning systems?
• How do we aggregate content?
• What are the legal and compliance issues?
• What are the new roles that must be created to go after this?
• Where do our skills fit? What new skills do we need?

Some of these questions are dependent on how we respond to others.

I think that the first step in gaining attention is figuring out 1) how to support self-service learning and user generated content which in turn fosters empowerment.

With user-generated content as the norm, then we have already established 2) how to get into the attention economy business as well as 3) how to dramatically lower production and delivery costs through participatory teaching & learning.

With user-generated content as the norm we can also establish 4) the new metrics [participation] and have at the same time provided a medium for 5) how to foster knowledge worker skills [through participation].

6) What does this mean for our current learning systems? Probably that many people may need to find other employment.

7) How do we aggregate content? That’s just a technical question that is being addressed in several venues.

8 ) What are the legal and compliance issues? Probably less difficult then the lawyers would lead us to believe, especially if empowerment and participation are what we really want.

9) What are the new roles that must be created to go after this? The roles will be as different as when a dictatorship becomes a democracy, such as the abolition of the Ministry of Information.
10) Where do our skills fit? What new skills do we need? We will have to become learners ourselves.

A participatory learning ecology gets rid of the intermediaries but puts more responsibility on all members of the network. Each node must contribute or risk exclusion from the network. I can’t see any way of making this work other than through empowerment of every individual and opening the channels for communication and collaboration.

It seems that bilingual education may finally become the norm in Canada’s only officially bilingual province, according to CanadaEast:

“We have immersion for people who like bilingualism, and for those who don’t like bilingualism there is Core French, and don’t worry, your child won’t really be learning French in Core French,” said Lamrock [NB Minister of Education] with an ironic tone.

“Maybe bilingualism isn’t accepted with unanimity, but we have a resolution: bilingualism is here to stay and maybe it is time to say bilingualism is a competence that everyone must have in New Brunswick.”

The official announcement should occur in a couple of weeks and then we can get on with other important issues in public education.

I’ve been reading as much of Dave Snowden’s work as possible, as I find the Cynefin framework makes a lot of sense to my own practice, which I’ve mentioned previously. In an earlier article, Snowden & Kurtz talk about an interesting case in The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-making in a Complex and Complicated World:

In another case, a group of West Point graduates were asked to manage the playtime of a kindergarten as a final year assignment. The cruel thing is that they were given time to prepare. They planned; they rationally identified objectives; they determined backup and response plans. They then tried to “order” children’s play based on rational design principles, and, in consequence, achieved chaos. They then observed what teachers do. Experienced teachers allow a degree of freedom at the start of the session, then intervene to stabilize desirable patterns and destabilize undesirable ones; and, when they are very clever, they seed the space so that the patterns they want are more likely to emerge.

To me, this case shows the weakness of instructional systems design.  We need a design model that helps to template “desirable patterns”; recognise “undesirable patterns” and provide a variety of “seeds” for the learning environment. This would be a far better approach for learning, as any learning intervention involving several people is arguably in a complex environment. One aspect of complex environments, according to the Cynefin model, is that “Cause and effect are only coherent in retrospect and do not repeat”. Sounds like most learning environments I know.

Another school closure today. That’s the second this week, and schools weren’t closed on Monday, when we had the worst driving conditions of the year. Here it’s just a regular work day, with a telephone interview to do and a discussion with a client scheduled. For me, information technologies reduce my dependence on industrial technologies.

Schools are closed today because of the flooded, and now icy, streets with more freezing rain in the forecast. Our school system is more dependent on the state of the roads and whether buses can ship loads of students back and forth than any other factor. The schools, like many businesses, take it for granted that people have to be placed in a central classroom or office  in order to get the job done.  That’s an outdated model in my opinion.

The Provincial government is currently advertising for a “future school infrastructure needs analyst”.

Duties: Reporting to the Director of Educational Facilities and Pupil Transportation, the successful candidate will study norms and standards currently used in the construction and development of school infrastructures and evaluate facilities built over the past few years in order to determine whether they meet needs and expectations; consult with educational services to determine whether space allocation standards meet the needs of the instructional program and support services to education; consult with education stakeholders and other provincial jurisdictions; and study new standards and trends in the field of construction related to energy efficiency, environmental protection, new technologies, accessibility, and security.

I wonder if the Department will question the underlying assumptions of our industrial school system, such as:

• Is there an optimal (more human) school size? [maybe 150 people]
• What is the environmental cost of large, factory-style schools?
• What effect does more than an hour per day of being bused have on learning readiness?
• What role can information technologies  have in creating more individualized learning environments and connecting with learners and specialists around the world?
• Add your own question …