Work is learning. Learning is the work.
Learning
I haven’t been posting much this Summer but I’ve taken some time to catch up on my reading and my social bookmarks are growing. Here are some items that have caught my interest:
Ma.gnolia, a social bookmark service, goes open source
Three ingredients to building your global microbrand
Whatever happened to performance support?
The Lifecycle of Emergence – Networks, CoP’s and systems of influence
I’ve been involved in some way with LearnNB since its inception in 2003. For the most part, it’s been very much a maintenance of the status quo kind of professional/industrial association. There have been some interesting conferences but the association has produced few tangible results.
I worked as a paid contractor for LearnNB this Spring, after a long arm’s-length relationship (some of which I explained in Rx for NB Learning). The main reason I took on this contract was because of the integrity of Kathy Watt, President of LearnNB. In her latest message, Kathy addresses some real issues facing those of us in the workplace.
Think about this: professional management was born from the desire to optimize and control, not to lead waves of change. You may be familiar with the names of a couple of fathers of modern management theory, Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford. “Oh, not us,” you may say. “Just last year the whole senior management team spent two brain-numbing days tearing apart the strategic plan with the sole purpose of renewing leadership and thus, heightening innovation within our organization.” Dr. Phil’s now well-worn question is still appropriate, “So, how’s that workin’ for ya?’
Her advice includes this – “... we need to experience some personal and professional humility, and admit that we don’t really know how to solve some of the complex challenges that we are facing.”
This is a very refreshing perspective and I hope that others take up the conversation and see what we can do when we discuss our issues openly and candidly.
For some, public school is already back in session, while others have a couple of weeks left. Both of our boys go back to high school after the labour day weekend. We’ve already purchased our school supplies, which were fewer than required in previous years.
Over the years I’ve picked up online resources that I think might be useful for our boys and have tagged these as student_resources in Delicious. They are a mix of how-to’s and learning aids for students ranging from elementary school to university. Here are some examples:
Stephen Downes’ post on How to write articles and essays
Understanding logic via The Fallacy Files
The Animated Periodic Table of Elements
How to do research from the Kentucky Virtual Library
So far, there are about 50 resources and I keep adding to the pile whenever I find something of interest. I try not to add too many or they won’t look through them. If you use the same tag, we can share resources. Our guys have the link to these bookmarks in their browsers. It’s a home-made EPSS for students.
Via StartUpNorth is news of a bootstrapped website creation/hosting service for teachers. Classtell reminds me of edublogs but it has some differences. Firstly, it’s Canadian and secondly it is not free. The cost is only $20 per year and that should ensure some cashflow so that the system doesn’t collapse as it grows. It also means no advertising.
You can create an unlimited number of pages on your Classtell website. These pages can used for assignments, calendars, blogs, and more.
You also have 500MB of storage space on your Classtell account to upload and share files, handouts and photos with your class.
Oh, and the most interesting part of this new company? The founder is only 15 years old!
Ross Dawson shows four representations of the social media tool landscape, with the most recent and colourful Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas:
Two of these visualizations have Conversation at the centre and this one includes, “The art of listening, learning and sharing”. Ross Dawson’s own example from last year puts social media along two axes, one being from “Sharing Content” to “Recommending/Filtering”. One the one end, content is made and shared by everyone and anyone, such as with YouTube videos or millions of blog posts. There are many tools to facilitate this process, as shown in these charts. Now that we too much stuff to easily make sense of, and it keeps on expanding, we need to find patterns. That is what the other tools at the other end of Dawson’s axis help us do.
These visualizations can be used as a basis for teaching about social media. The prism may be complicated for first use, so I would start with Dawson’s X axis (Sharing to Filtering). You could begin by looking at the content that is out there and start to filter it, trying different tools. This might be a good approach for people who are not overly comfortable on the Web and are not ready to create their own content. The Prism can be used later to show the variety of tools and categories of tools and then look at content creation.
From listening to sharing, while learning on the way, may be a good first path into the web of social media. It’s something I will consider as I guide more learners and clients.
On Tuesday the government of New Brunswick made a decision on early French immersion education, after having been forced by a court to reconsider an earlier decision. The “final” decision is one that baffles me from a research perspective but makes sense from a political one. This decision makes people feel better about being unilingual and gives a false sense that literacy in the first language will now improve.
Early French Immersion, which begins in kindergarten or Grade 1 in all Canadian provinces will now start in Grade 3 in Canada’s only officially bilingual province. It seems that New Brunswickers need to concentrate on first language skills before being saddled with a second. That is in spite of the research that shows that learning a second language actually enhances first language skills. Our politicians and bureaucrats are not ones to let data cloud their preconceived notions of what actually works.
French immersion is a program that is open to all, where the demand exists. One problem has been that not all parents want it. The other issue is that special needs children cannot get services in French, so they must opt for the English program. It creates what the Minister calls streaming. This is streaming because the Department of Education has never put adequate resources into the immersion program. And so it gets watered down.
This government and the education system have been pushing the idea that an optional second language immersion program, fought for 30 years ago, is detrimental to the education of all children because only a minority take it. Streaming is presented as the root of our educational woes, even though the immersion program received very little of the Department’s teaching support resources last year.
Now we have the only early second language immersion program in Canada that starts in Grade 3. What would you do if you were from another province and had a choice of schooling your children in New Brunswick? This is a real decision for military families or those considering a career move to this province, such as university professors. Would you move here or would you stay away from this anomaly and give your children more educational options?
I can see nothing about this new program that is attractive to anyone outside of this Province. It is not innovative in any sense. An innovative approach would have been second language immersion for ALL students beginning in kindergarten. This move is a retrograde action. The drive-through province has become the drive-away-from province.
The price of fuel seems to be driving an uptake in online learning for higher education. Ray Schroeder has even started a blog about Fueling Online Learning, which I discovered via George Siemens.
I remember about a decade ago the discussions around the return on investment of online learning and the major factor was the reduction of travel time. You could save a LOT of money by not sending people on courses. However we learned that most people like to travel, get out of the office and socialize while learning. Some may even say that learning is a social endeavour.
So the scales may have finally tipped in favour of learning at a distance. Luckily for learners, there are a lot of social tools to add to the mix and a course doesn’t have to be a page-turning electronic book. Even if the institution only provides the content, learners can create study groups or plug into other networks, just avoid places like Ryerson if you intend on being a social learner.
Getting enough people wanting or needing to learn online should tip the scales toward more social learning. Perhaps we may escape the course/module constraint, especially as more workers use the Net for professional development. We, the pioneers in working and learning on the Web [check the header here], know the advantages of connecting to multiple networks and learning either serindipitously or just-in-time to solve a problem. It’s like water for fishes; we just do it.
As we get more online learners, let’s reach out and show them that it may not be easy but it’s possible to have rich learning experiences and meet some very interesting people online.
Jay Cross and Clark Quinn hosted a session this week on The Future of the Book:
The net has changed everything. Young people read screens, not paper. Plus, we’re all potential publishers now.
Publishing traditionally provided editorial, production, and marketing services. Today I can buy very rapid, very good, very low-priced editing from India. On-demand publishers will print as many (or as few) copies as you like. And publishers’ traditionally shoddy marketing is even more worthless in the days of online reputation and long-tail distribution.
The issue of literacy is a hot button topic and in my experience can be promoted for the wrong reasons and often without the data to back up the premises. I haven’t researched literacy in detail but I’m starting to keep some references, especially those that go against conventional wisdom.
Mark Federman introduced me to the idea that literacy is changing and we had better understand these changes, in Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read:
… the notion that our beloved literacy is now nothing but a quaint notion, an aesthetic form that is as irrelevant to the real questions and issues of pedagogy today as is recited poetry – clearly not devoid of value, but equally no longer the structuring force of society.
Even The Economist, conservative as it is, questions the value of linear print literacy:
So, no surprise that when we incarcerate teenagers of today in traditional classroom settings, they react with predictable disinterest and flunk their literacy tests. They are skilled in making sense not of a body of known content, but of contexts that are continually changing.
I have feet planted in both camps, as I enjoy reading books but also spend much time following hyperlinks and co-creating written conversations online. I’m not sure what the future holds, but we have to look at literacy from a scientific and not a romantic perspective. For example, literacy groups and educators should broaden their perspectives on the definition of literacy as 4 billion people connect to the Internet with their mobile, text-messaging, video-enabled devices.
Yesterday, I attended Martin Weller’s presentation on SocialLearn, hosted by George Siemens, with the recording now available online. SocialLearn is a project of The Open University and takes Weinberger’s concept of small pieces loosely joined and applies it to higher education. I wrote about Small (learning) pieces loosely joined three ago and have long been a proponent of getting outside the LMS box set of constraints. In the case of SocialLearn, I think that they have the right concept for social learning on the Web and now have to clarify their own business model (yes, even universities must have business models).
The basic model is to provide the interface (API) that enables learners to connect with other systems and platforms. This strategy allows the “connector agency”, in this case the university, to quickly adopt new applications as they are used by students and teachers. Check out the diagrams on the SocialLearn blog for examples.
I see this approach as enabling critical thinking tools for each learner, as the situation warrants, and I strongly support this model.
Changing the role of The Open University from main content and application provider to a more facilitative role, with constantly changing technologies, will require a new business model and that is what Martin and his peers are looking at. The real money in higher education has almost always been around certification. That’s why Harvard can charge more, because Harvard certification is worth more on the market. Universities charge more than community colleges and for the most part, on-line degrees aren’t valued as much in-place ones. Certification, or how many degrees are granted, also drives the funding model for many state-subsidized institutions. Control the valued certification and you control the money flow. Just remember that the market may change its mind on what is valued.
Here is an excerpt from a proposal that Rob Paterson and I wrote this year:
Organizations that are decisively moving to the web are doing well. For example, iTunes is the second largest music store in the world, and the BBC have so much action online now, that some ISP’s in the UK are having bandwidth problems. NPR in the US is decisively moving to the Web and has a number of pilots out in the market and tools in development. Organisations that only partially moved to the open Web are doing less well – Barnes & Noble is really a bookstore with a web presence that fears that if its web presence was successful it would damage its store business. The New York Times has the same issue. It has more web subscribers than paper subscribers but all its costs are tied into the paper. The music business tried to stop downloading and to hold onto bundling where its main revenues were derived. But in working to protect its current model it killed its future.
This is the problem. In this revolution, the old model is where the current revenues are located. Going to the new has to threaten this model. So leaders in the old hesitate or act half heartedly. They cannot put the new inside the old.
The answer to this paradox is to locate the new in a separate unit and to go after customers who are not served by the current model. This way you can hold onto the value of your existing franchise for as long as possible while building up the new in parallel.
Perhaps the best way for SocialLearn to go forward is to create a completely new playing field for the millions of non-consumers of higher education and become the de facto leader in a new space, much as the OU did in the 1960’s. It will be interesting to see if there is room for several players in this space and who else is moving into it.
Nine Shift has a series of posts on the changing nature of work and how the idea of responsibility usurped morals during the industrial age (See Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3).
“In the Industrial Age of the 20th century, you didn’t have to be of good moral character to work in the factory. But you did have to be responsible. And so teachers in the 20th century schoolhouse and college taught (still teach) responsibility. And by that teachers mean specific behaviors.
Those behaviors are now obsolete. They made sense in the factory … But not in the virtual office.”
This post had me thinking about our approach to work literacy, and its foundation on skills, such as how to deal with information flows or personal knowledge mastery. What if the real challenge to be productive in the new workplace will be an attitude shift? Organisations may not be concerned if you work a full shift or are spending time at your work space. Compensation may become focused not just on results but creative solutions to the organisation’s issues. The required attitude may be creativity, as in “what have you done that’s different?”.
As we moved from morality to responsibility one hundred years ago, are we now shifting from responsibility to creativity? If we do, then most of our organisational tools and measurements about productivity may have to get thrown out.