It’s been a hectic week, with a full-day session in Ottawa followed by a long flight to Las Vegas, and then three days of TechKnowledge 2007. It’s been a time to connect and re-connect with many people and have several long conversations. I guesss that this trip has reinforced my understanding that learning is conversation. It’s how you make meaning, by having conversations in the trusted space that you’ve been lucky enough to create.

I didn’t get to many of the sessions but I’m glad that I was able to attend Tony Karrer’s presentation on blogs and social tagging. Each time you see someone else explaining a concept to others, you understand a bit more how to communicate it yourself. Tony did a great job working with an audience that had wide-ranging levels of skills and knowledge.

There hasn’t been much time for reflection on all that’s transpired but that can wait for the red-eye flight back to Canada tonight. There will also be some announcements concerning the unworkshops next week, so stay tuned.

Of course, there has been a been some time for little bit of sightseeing …

but I didn’t get a chance to take in any of the shows:

Some links and references that I promised during yesterday’s workshop in Ottawa are here.

The discussion on networked learning, with Leigh Blackall

Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users

Presentation Zen Blog

Judy Brown’s Web 2.0 Tools

Robert Paterson’s interview about blogging with PBS. Follow the link that Rob provides and look on the right box called Extended Interviews.

The Five Minute University video

Lawrence Lessig, On free and the differences between culture & code, Google Video

Just add a note in the comments if I missed something. Some other links will be sent to everyone via e-mail.

I’d like to thank everyone who came out and helped to make a great day of meaningful conversations.

The CSTD Ottawa Informal Learning Workshop is tomorrow, Tuesday January 30th.

I’ll be discussing informal learning in general, personal knowledge management, various tools and analysis & implementation techniques.

If you would like share your views or say how you’ve implemented some type of workplace informal learning then Skype me between Noon and 4:00 PM EST (GMT-5) for a quick chat with the participants. We’re expecting about 25 people from various industries and government departments in the Ottawa area [for those on my skype contact list, I may be pinging you tomorrow].

This past year I used Elgg as my blogging platform for the Informl Learning Unworkshops, as I wanted to keep my posts separate from my main website. As many readers already know, I am a real fan of Elgg, which is a social networking, blogging, aggregating and e-portfolio system all in one. It’s also available as a free service or as open source code to host yourself. However, the experts are always available for additional services.

I recently revisited my site on Elgg, where I have a number of informal learning-related articles. Since I last posted, Elgg has been updated and is even more usable, in my opinion. Today, as I was explaining how it works, the ability to tag each post with a level of privacy (Public, Logged in Users Only, Specific Community Members, Group Members, Private) was seen has a great feature, especially to those new to blogging and Web 2.0 applications.

I’ll be covering Elgg in some detail during the CSTD Ottawa workshop next week and thought I’d give a heads-up to anyone who may want to create an account, explore a bit and discuss their experience.

This is a continuation of my posts on informal learning in advance of the CSTD Ottawa workshop on 30 January.

You can learn a lot through blogging and reading blogs, but it’s usually not what you were expecting. Many times you can go through a series of posts looking for something specific and then wind up following a completely different thread. Life on the Web is like life off the Web. You don’t get what you expect. As Pooh said, “They’re funny things, Accidents. You never have them till you’re having them.” Learning, especially informal learning, is similar.

I’ve found that the discipline of writing has forced me to read with a more critical eye and to read in more depth so that I can make some sense out the various, and often conflicting, messages. In the process of the discipline of reading and writing online, I get a few insights, but not when I’m expecting them. I have to prepare my mind to receive, though not much gets through compared to how much I read. I think that even less would get through if I didn’t do this regularly.

Blogging, or writing an online journal that anyone can read and comment upon, seems to be the core of my informal learning on the Web. Wikis are good for projects and teams, while social bookmarks become great virtual bookshelves that anyone can browse. Skype (voice over the Internet) keeps me in touch with my extended network and is excellent for asking quick questions (as is any other IM system). I still haven’t mastered social networking software (SNS) , such as Linked-In, but Seb Paquet told me several years ago that bloggers don’t really need SNS. For the time being, blogs are the core of my social and learning Web.

Here’s a technical, but easy to understand, diagram of how blogs work.

There are about 15 people signed up for the Ottawa informal learning workshop. This post is for anyone who is keen and wants to get in some early reading. Of course it’s not required, but these could spark some ideas for interesting conversations.

Jay Cross has just posted Internet Culture & the Evolution of Learning. This is a great read if you’re interested in the big picture of why this stuff may be important. Jay’s article is more comprehensive than my previous post on the forces of change.

Here’s a short post, by Tom Haskins called, I found it inside my blog reader, that gives you an idea of how some people in the educational technology field are connecting and learning informally – without any direction ;-)

If you’re looking for something concrete, here’s a post on How a restaurant uses stories to keep staff motivated.

An aggregated listing of various Definitions of Informal learning by Mohamed Amine Chatti.

If you want to dig deeper into social networking, then Dave Pollard’s Whirlwind tour of social networking for business covers a lot of the available tools.

SoulSoup on Why companies try to avoid informal learning, knowledge sharing and even innovation in the workplace.

Finally, I would recommend watching an interview (33 minutes) with Robert Paterson, done by Iowa Public TV in 2006, in which Rob explains the power of blogging.

… or just have a laugh:

I’m conducting a workshop on informal learning on Tuesday, January 30th. In preparation for the workshop and hopefully to foster some early conversations, I’ll be posting my thoughts on informal learning here for the next week.

My initial reaction, when asked to present a full day workshop on informal learning, was to ensure that what I was going to talk about was not just a bunch of hype on the latest Web 2.0 tools that are being tested by the early adopters in the educational technology field. I didn’t want to be selling a new brand of silicon snake oil, so I tried to look at what forces are actually changing the way we work and learn.

First of all, the ubiquitous connectivity that over a billion people now have has had a significant impact. Search (or Google as a verb) is an integral part of most of our lives. Today, we can publish something online as soon as we feel like it – whether in the form of blogs, wikis, social spaces like MySpace or FaceBook, as well as pictures or videos. We can find almost anything online and we can share our digital creations with the world. We can also connect with individuals.

The main force of the Web is that you don’t need anyone else (postman, broadcaster, photo developer, social convener) to help you reach out to the world and find others who may be interested in the same thing you are. Until recently, we needed an organisation (company, union, association, school) to help us connect with others. Now we can pretty well do it on our own.

One of the main forces of change that will affect how we learn is the weakening of the industrial command & control organisation. We don’t need a third party to mediate our learning because we can find interesting stuff and interesting people (interesting to us, at least) on the Web. I see those workers, who one could call the “Cluetrained’, as already dropping out of the bottom of the industrial organisation’s pyramid and doing it on their own. “It” meaning working, learning, creating and collaborating.

We’re seeing signs of this weakening of the industrial hierarchical model (see Wirearchy for more details), with workers dropping out of the “Corporation” and becoming free agents. Will this trend continue? I don’t know; but it sure appears that a job for life is a thing of the past and learning how learn for yourself, or at least with your own online network, might not be a bad skill-set. Unfortunately, many of us have come through school and training programs where we’ve been told what the learning objectives are and that we will be tested at the end of the course. On completion, we get a certificate to hang on the wall to simulate some kind of actual competence.

The figure below is my first attempt to synthesize these thoughts into a graphic. I’m not an artist, but I’m learning informally ;-)

In a less structured and networked world, we all will need to learn in unstructured and networked ways. More to follow …