Informal Learning

Maybe the more things change, the more they remain the same. I was reviewing a White Paper that I had written in 2000 for my employer at the time and found that not much has changed when it comes to workplace learning. This paper was loosely based on some parts of my thesis, which was published in 1998, so the major themes are at least a decade old.

Here was one of my opening statements on knowledge and learning:

Knowledge is the result of the process of learning, and learning can be defined as a process of giving meaning to our experiences. This view of learning as an active, continuous process is essential when examining workplace learning. Learning is not only some formal event, which happens in a classroom, resulting in information to perform a discrete task, but is also a continuing process of doing and reflecting. We know that people learn as they work, and that the pace of learning and re-learning is increasing everyday.

The “learning organization” was the rage in the late ’90’s, but you seem to hear less about it now.

The learning organization has the potential to become the model for the new workplace. Moving from an organization of many independent workers to a network of interdependent workers will require change on many levels. Implementing a learning organization requires that learning occurs at the individual, team and organizational levels. These changes threaten not only personal mental models but traditional power structures. Many employers and organizations are attempting to change their workplaces into more learning-oriented environments, but the current popularity of e-learning must survive the initial infatuation stage in order to develop stable systems for organizational learning.

It makes me think that when it comes to workplace learning, we haven’t advanced that much.

Many people are finding it difficult to make the transfer into the new knowledge-based economy This may indicate a need for adult learning expertise in order to increase business productivity. Workplaces have to allow for individual learning on the job because workers cannot become learners if the climate is not open to change. The changing role of the immediate supervisor to that of coach will be critical in achieving the ideal of the learning organization. The need for educated, knowledgeable workers with current skills and abilities will continue to increase but the power to change the workplace to a more learning-oriented, and therefore more adaptable, environment rests with those in charge: the employers.

I haven’t seen massive changes, have you?

At the Internet Time Community we’ve been having a discussion about adopting blogs and social bookmarks for organisations. These kinds of efforts need pioneers to go out and test the myriad of web 2.0 applications and figure out which ones will work in their organisation. With all of the options available, it can be a bit daunting, as Gillian asks:

do you spend a lot of time trying out things that don’t do exactly what you need them to? Or having to upgrade/change all the time to get the better fit for purpose (and hoping for high compatibility?)

My own reponse is that early adopters make the mistakes first and can then teach others, hopefully saving time and frustration. This is what I have previously described as Bridging the Chasm for my clients.  It’s pretty well impossible to explain how all of these small pieces loosely joined actually work unless you have used them yourself. We freelancers have that luxury of not being constrained by an IT department ;-)

We conducted several “unworkshops” on informal learning on the Web last year and learned a lot. We also met some interesting people, several of whom have continued the conversation around the use of two-way web tools for organisational learning.

Jay has now created The Unworkshop Legacy Page as an information resource and has coupled this with the Internet Time Community where the conversation can continue. Please come and join us.

I think that this open forum has the best potential to scale up, as our unworkshops worked well with web-savvy learners but could be difficult for those not used to adding and tweaking web applications on the fly. Anyone who wants just information can read the legacy page while those who are more communicative can join the community social network.

My own experience has been that face-to-face workshops, where participants have a laptop and Internet access, work best for the mainstream. A little bit of explanation, some concepts and a chance to play in a controlled environment with personal assistance, seems to be a good mix.

When I discuss the basics of personal knowledge management on the Web I usually suggest starting with a Feed Aggregator (like Bloglines) and a Social Bookmark service (like Ma.gnolia or del.icio.us). Using these two tools, you can manage the streams of information that flow by and mark items of note for future reference and sharing.

One of the more difficult aspects of reading blogs has been tracking the comments. Now there are several services available to help you with that. Basically, they act like a feed reader for specific posts and tell you if anyone has added another comment since you last looked. I started with coComment last year, but found it had a few glitches when I used the Firefox plug-in, so I abandoned it. It probably works fine now, as I get frequent visits to my site via coComment.

How do I know that I get visits from coComment? I use Blogflux’s MapStats which is a service only for blogs that shows you who has visited your site, where they come from, what search terms they’ve used, etc. Blogflux has recently introduced Commentful, which is similar to coComment and lets you track any conversation with a right mouse-click. So far I’ve found it simple and easy to track blogs where I’ve left comments.

One other comment tracking service that I’ve come across is co.mments, which appears to be simple and easy, but I haven’t tried it out.

Once you’re comfortable with an RSS feed aggregator, the next addition to your learning 2.0 toolbox should be a comment tracker.

Yesterday I gave a 90 minute online session to the Calgary eLearning Network, using Elluminate (a free “room” was provided by the company). This web presentation platform is quite robust and simple to learn if you’ve some experience with synchronous web tools. It’s based on a presentation model though, which means that it’s best for a lecture format, with one person doing most of the talking. It’s more difficult to get a conversation going, with only one person holding the microphone at any given time. The audio was good and I liked the polling function to get some quick feedback.

Here are links to what we discussed, in order of appearance:

Informal Learning Website and Jay’s book on Informal Learning

Dion Hinchcliffe’s blog on Web 2.0 (I used some of his excellent diagrams)

Hugh McLeod’s Gaping Void cartoons and commentary (may not be workplace safe)

Accenture Report on managers finding information on intranets

Dave Pollard on PKM

Will Richardson on Reading & Writing Online

Stock & Flow on the InternetTime Wiki

Leigh Blackall’s Networked Learning photo set

On the right navigation bar of this site are my External Links, including My Feed Aggregator and My Bookmarks. There are also several posts on PKM on this blog.

* You can test out Elluminate with their free vRoom offer.

With my upcoming online presentation on personal knowledge management (PKM) to the Calgary eLearning Network tomorrow, I’m going through some collected files on the subject. I’ve also noticed that “personal learning” was a topic for a panel discussion at the recent eLearning Guild conference. Tony O’Driscoll has remarked that:

This is also one of the coolest things about Web 2.0 that we talked about on the panel. First and foremost Steven made the point that your approach as an educator should not be “OK let me figure out what blogs, wikis, social tagging, You Tube, Second Life and Moodle mean for my learning strategy or my learners.” Instead Steven suggests you start in the most obvious place -Where might that be? you ask – Why YOU and your own learning of course – Steven [Stephen Downes] says.

Learning has always been a personal thing, even when it happens in formal training. It’s also social, in that our learning is affected by our social context, whether it be in conversation or observation. What’s relatively new is that the Web lets us do some of our personal and social learning in a much easier way. We can connect, reflect, dispute and research with the click of the mouse.

My experience in helping trainers and educators with learning on the Web reinforces Stephen Downe’s advice to start with YOU. Those who are using the Web for their own learning have an easier transition in using it in training & education.

I guess it would be similar to asking someone to be a trainer in the pre-Web era. Could they be a good trainer if they lacked presentation, speaking, writing, or organisation skills? Today, you need web-learning skills.

For further digging, here are some articles I’ve tagged with PKM. Here are a bunch more tagged PKM on del.icio.us.

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.