I’ll be conducting a day-long workshop on informal learning in Ottawa on 30 January 2007. The event is sponsored by CSTD and members get a discount. Please feel free to contact me about the workshop and add any questions or issues that you would like to discuss. I’ll be arriving in Ottawa the afternoon of the 29th if anyone wants to get together before the event, and I’ll probably be staying at the same hotel. Participants also get a copy of Jay’s book on Informal Learning (a great read).
Learning
Learning
Wildlife Photograph Archive
I volunteer as Director of Education at the Atlantic Wildlife Institute (AWI), which is located just outside our town of Sackville:
The AWI is unique among wildlife rescue programs in Atlantic Canada in using rehabilitation to identify and highlight key environmental health issues for public attention and response.
Learning by doing is central to the mission. Wildlife rehabilitation work is a kind of ecological sampling. It helps identify environmental change. Habitat loss, toxicity, and wildlife-borne diseases can all be better understood if we document and study wildlife afflicted by these conditions.
During the past year I started an AWI photo gallery on Flickr as a shared resource of wildlife pictures. We use these photos in our educational programs. I have since created a group photo pool called Atlantic Wildlife Network. Our aim is to have an open database of wildlife pictures that can be used for educational activities. We hope to get pictures of North American animals at different stages of development and from various angles in their natural habitats. We’ll also continue to add pictures of the hundreds of animals that pass through AWI annually.
If you have pictures that you would be willing to share, then please check out the photo pool. Membership is open. I would suggest using a Creative Commons license, such as Public Domain, Attribution-ShareAlike, or Attribution-Non-Commercial. This would make it easy to share and use the pictures without having to check with each copyright holder. Note that Flickr allows you to mark individual photographs with separate licenses.
Please feel free to use those photographs already posted. Thanks & happy new year :-)
And there is now an AWI Photo Blog with more pictures.
Myths, Research & Sharing
Once again, Will Thalheimer nails what is passed off as corporate research as actually the propagation of a myth (meme?), asking:
Is it plagiarism if you steal a lie?
The culprit in this case is Forrester Research. The previous culprit was NTL. Will is doing the field a great favour by holding us to high standards of research and citation.
My own experience is that a lot of corporate research is fluff that is sold for very high prices. Many researchers, like Will or Stephen, or practitioners like Jay, make their work available for free, in order to encourage peer collaboration. The free information and research is just as good, if not better, than the “research” that is sold as fancy white papers to large, unsuspecting organisations. I find that it’s worth your while to pay for research that is contextual to your particular circumstances or to hire a researcher to look specifically at your field or region. Generic research, sold in +$1,000, one-size-fits-all packages, is probably not worth it.
Caveat emptor
Informal Learning on the Road
I’m heading out on the road in 2007. I will be giving a one day workshop on informal learning in Ottawa on January 30th, through CSTD. Time and location will be posted early in January. If you plan on attending, please feel free to contact me with your preferences or issues you’d like to explore. After three online unworkshops, I’m excited about trying out this new face-to-face technology ;-)
Immediately after the Ottawa workshop I’m jumping on a plane for ASTD TechKnowlege in Las Vegas. Jay, Judy and I will be presenting on informal learning on February 1st.
I’m really looking forward to seeing old and new faces and engaging in some good corridor discussions. The informal stuff is always the best.
Shaping versus Modelling
Dr. Clare Brant was the first Aboriginal psychiatrist in Canada and a professor of Psychiatry at University of Western Ontario. In 1982 he presented Mi’kmaq Ethics & Principles, which included an examination of the differences in teaching between native and non-native cultures.
Now the Teaching; Shaping Vs. Modelling
This is a more technical kind of thing. The white people use this method of teaching their children – it’s called ‘shaping’. Whereas the Indians use ‘modelling’. Shaping is B.F. Skinner’s ‘Operant Conditioning”, if you want to look into that one. Say a white person is teaching a white kid how to dress – he uses the shaping method, one way being “rewarding successive approximations” of the behaviour he wants. Some are really complicated; for instance, if a white woman wants to teach her kid how to dress, she puts his sock on halfway and encourages him to pull it up, finishes dressing him and says he’s a good boy having done that much. The next day he learns to pull the whole sock on, then the other sock. Now that process takes about six weeks. But the white mother who does not have all that much to do can take that time to do that sort of thing every morning to teach her kid how to dress. So in this group that we ran, with these young Native people in London, we started to sniff this out, and there is nothing random about this, as a matter of fact. I asked Mary, a Native person, how she taught her kid to dress and she said, “I didn’t, he just did it.” And I said, “Well, what do you mean?” It came to me that she did it until he was four or five years old, and then one day when the kid felt competent, he took over and did it himself. He did it then ever after, unless he was sick or regressed in some way.
Brant concludes this section by stating:
I’ve been having some collaboration with a professor of education, and he says that modelling is the best way to teach people. But shaping is the method that has to be used because there is so much information that has to be imparted in the system that you cannot use modelling. I suppose that the ultimate method would be for the teacher to go up to the blackboard and do algebraic equations for 7 or 8 months and invite one of the kids to come join him and do one with him. and maybe if one of the kids got interested, or knew how to do it, he could start solving the algebraic equation. But that’s not going to happen in the school system. There’s just not enough time.
I think that our industrial society has come full circle and in a McLuhanesque reversal we are overwhelmed by information. No longer can we use shaping but we have to reverse back to modelling. Shaping worked when our environment was complicated, but it is now complex. As knowledge expands and new information is constantly added, who has the base knowledge to do the shaping anyway? In our internetworked world, modelling how to learn is a better strategy than shaping on a pre-defined curriculum.
As can be seen by Dr. Brant’s examples, with modelling the learner is in control and with shaping the teacher is in control. This takes me back to something we were told about toilet training children.
Q: How long will it take if you train (shape) them?
A: About 3 months.
Q: How long will it take if you let them learn (model) by themselves?
A: About a quarter of a year.
Gracian on Learning
I dusted off the cover of a book I bought many years ago, and found some words of wisdom. The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658) to be exact. I found several that relate to informal learning in organisations.
Advice is sometimes transmitted more successfully through a joke than through grave teaching.
The wisdom passed along in conversation has meant more to some than the seven arts, no matter how liberal.
Much of our lives is spent gathering information. We see few things for ourselves, and live trusting others.
A shortcut to becoming a true person: put the right people beside you.
Nothing bewitches like service to others, and the best way to win friends is to act like one. The most and best we have depends on others.
The art of conversation is the measure of a true person. No human activity calls for so much discretion, for none is more common. It is here that we win or lose.
Centre for Learning Technologies – Lessons Learnt
As I was going through some old reports I came across an article I had written about the CLT. My first job out of the military was as Project Manager (Learning & Performance Systems) at the CLT. This was probably the best job I ever had and much of what we did has formed the basis of my current consulting practice.
Today, many higher education institutions are creating innovation centres that are outwardly focused and revenue-generating, so in the spirit of learning from our experiences, I’m posting the article here.
Overview
The Centre for Learning Technologies (CLT) was an applied research, consulting and resource centre for the use of new media in learning, knowledge management, and workplace performance support. Bridging the gap between research and practice, the CLT aimed to link learning theory, business practices and research to real-world, organizational challenges and applications. Clients included private corporations, public organizations and higher education institutions. The specialized consultants and researchers were located at Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB.
The Centre offered an objective source of resources and services through four market offerings, each with projects focused on learning, knowledge management, and performance support. The four market offerings were:
- Innovation Practices
- Professional Services
- The Learning Community
- Usability, Human Factors Specialty Center
These areas had been identified as gaps during an industry assessment conducted by the CLT with the support of the New Brunswick Government’s department of economic development. The four areas above were identified as niche areas, with no other organizations in the region offering these services at the time. The project areas: learning, knowledge management and performance support were identified as growth areas in the Organizational and Performance Improvement fields and corresponded to the expertise available at the CLT.
History
The Centre for Learning Technologies was established in 1996 at Mount Allison University. The Centre was created through the support of several private and public organizations, with the majority of the funding coming from ACOA. Assistance came in many forms including start-up operational funding, capital financing and business guidance. Funding for capital costs, such as the new building, was in the range of $3.5M while operating capital was approximately $200K.
Contributing partners included:
- NBTel (now Bell Aliant)
- Digital Equipment Corporation (later Compaq – HP)
- Andersen Consulting (now Accenture)
- Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA)
- Federal Government Infrastructure Program
- Royal Bank of Canada
- Bragg Communications
- Mount Allison University
- Weston Foundation
One of these contributions, the secondment of a business development officer, spanned a period of two years. The original concept for the CLT was as a multimedia Centre of Excellence with a mandate to help the university and organizations across Canada in the area of new media learning. The mandate and focus of the CLT changed as it developed, moving to a focus on bridging the gap between applied research and practice in workplace performance. The main rationale for this move was the requirement to become revenue-generating and self-sustaining after its first year.
During its five years in operation (1996-2001) the CLT generated about 85% of its costs. The remaining 15% was covered by the university. By its last year, the CLT was closing this gap. The university’s administration decided to close the CLT in the Spring of 2001, citing lack of profit and little alignment with the university’s main business of undergraduate education as reasons for closure.
Observations and Lessons Learnt
- The lack of operating capital (barely enough for Year 1) forced the CLT into a business model that pushed it away from the university’s core mission, thus alienating the Centre from any potential internal supporters.
- The CLT was not aligned with a specific academic department. The original intent was to have the CLT work with the Education Faculty, but this department was closed just as the CLT was created.
- The revenue-generation mandate forced the CLT to focus on external clients and strong relationships with internal university departments did not develop. There were few internal champions of the CLT at Mount Allison University.
- The original proposal for the CLT spoke of considerable potential revenues and profits. These unrealistic expectations did not help in seeking funds to offset revenue shortfalls.
- It took five years for the CLT to develop a professional reputation and a client base. By 2001, clients were approaching the Center directly.
Informal economy; informal learning
I’ve read most of the Toffler’s books over the years, including Future Shock, The Third Wave and Powershift; and have yet to read Revolutionary Wealth. I agree with Lawrence Fisher (S+B) that the value in their work is not crystal ball gazing but making sense of various patterns:
In retrospect, Mr. Toffler was less a reliable prophet than a brilliant synthesist. Future Shock and its successors, The Third Wave (Morrow, 1980) and Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (Bantam, 1990) were at their best not when predicting what would happen, but when drawing from a vast array of disciplines – science, technology, sociology, and religion – to explain the circumstances of the world at large.
Their latest book says that we are seeing huge growth in the informal economy, “According to the Tofflers, countless other industries and institutions face waves of “prosumers”, who produce and consume products and services outside the monetary economy. This is a historic change in the way wealth is created, the Tofflers write, spearheaded (for now, at least) by the United States.”
Here are some thoughts on education from the interview:
S+B: In the book, you write of education’s failure to move from the industrial age to the knowledge economy. Is homeschooling a prosumer response to this crisis?
TOFFLER: Yes, now that you mention it. It is an important and growing form of prosuming. The parents do it themselves, because the market does not supply what they want or need, or for that matter what the market needs.Think about how we learned to use personal computers. PC use went from zero to hundreds of millions of people who know and use PCs routinely, and nobody went to school to learn how.
Instead, chances are you found a guru, and a guru was anyone who bought his PC a week before you bought yours. And there were user groups – volunteers passing valuable knowledge back and forth. If you agree that the PC has had an impact on productivity in the money economy, then the fact that people taught each other how to use this thing without money changing hands is another example of what a big impact prosumers can have on the money economy. Add these things together — homeschooling, teaching how to use PCs, Linux, etc. – and you begin to understand this big invisible economic force. People have written about each of these pieces, but haven’t seen them as part of a huge nonmoney economy interacting with the money economy.
It’s not just parents, but knowledge workers inside and outside of organisations, who are taking learning into their own hands. As the non-money economy is affecting the measured economy, informal learning is affecting education. More and more, we can do it ourselves, whether it be printing our own photographs or learning a new skill. Homeschooling is getting easier with the Internet and so is learning for yourself. Formal training and education (one size fits nobody) can’t react quick enough to our changing needs and expanding fields knowledge.
That’s where I see the importance of understanding informal learning within organisations. It’s happening anyway, and at an accelerating rate. Organisations should look at tapping informal learning, not controlling it. The more free-thinkers and independent learners that an organisation has, the more resilient it will be in times of change. This of course is subversive thinking for any command and control organisation, so perhaps we really need new organisational models. The film crew is an example.
Formal education exploded as we moved into the industrial age one hundred years ago, with larger organisations demanding Taylorist job functions. As the industrial age gives way to a networked age, there is less need for well-defined, cookie-cutter jobs. With fewer standardized jobs, why do we need standardized education, or even standardized training? [I know that there are exceptions to this statement, but they are becoming fewer]
Copyright not good for learning
Canadian documentaries are better known, and have won more awards, than our feature films have. Documentaries, like education, need relevant artifacts to get their message across. If every image is copyright protected it’s difficult to tell a story without paying off all of the commercial interests first. Michael Geist reports on the Documentary Organization of Canada’s recent letter to the federal government:
The letter notes the growing concern with the effect of copyright on documentary film makers, citing the survey results which found that 85 percent of film makers find copyright more harmful than beneficial and 82 percent find that the law is more likely to discourage them from making new films. The letter notes that copyright reform could be used to address these concerns, yet there are fears that it will actually make things worse. The film makers chief concerns include modifying fair dealing by expanding the current list of enumerated categories, providing film makers with the right to circumvent DRM systems if anti-circumvention legislation is introduced, avoiding a ban on devices that can be used to circumvent DRM systems, reform of the orphan works regime, simplification of copyright clearance, and providing stable funding to Canada’s archives. The letter is signed by 130 of Canada’s most prominent documentary film makers including Oscar winner Denys Arcand (indeed, Quebec film makers represent the largest group of signatories).
The same situation exists for students and teachers putting together educational media. Tools like Creative Commons Search help to find that small percentage of CC licensed work, but orphan works are a huge untapped mine for learning. Let’s see a similar letter from representatives of the educational field.
Shake your cognitive tree
It’s good to come across something that really makes you question things that you probably don’t even think much about consciously. I save up podcasts for long drives and yesterday I spent about six hours in the car, catching up on a long list of archived podcasts. Two of these were absolutely fascinating, and I would suggest listening to both, in this order:
1. Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, with The Future of Ideas:
Sam Harris debates many points relating to religion, particularly the dangers that can be brought about by religious extremists — in any faith — around the world, and in our own country. Even religious moderates play a role by allowing the intolerance of extremists to grow.
2. Sue Blackmore on Memes:
Memetics is an intellectually rich but controversial field which seeks to explain how our minds and cultures are designed by natural selection acting on replicating information, just as organisms evolve by natural selection acting on genes. Sue Blackmore, one of the field’s leading thinkers, skillfully unfolds the major arguments for a meme’s-eye view of the world, and explores the implications for humanity. Are our brains best seen as machines invented by and for propagation of selfish memes?
Much food for thought and further conversations (or meme spreading).