Learning

Learning

the community is the curriculum

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The title of this post comes from a line in Dave Cormier’s article on Rhizomatic Education published in Innovate: Journal of Online Education [free but registration required, and I’m not sure why they insist on this additional hurdle for access].

Why rhizomatic?

A rhizomatic plant has no center and no defined boundary; rather, it is made up of a number of semi-independent nodes, each of which is capable of growing and spreading on its own, bounded only by the limits of its habitat (Cormier 2008). In the rhizomatic view, knowledge can only be negotiated, and the contextual, collaborative learning experience shared by constructivist and connectivist pedagogies is a social as well as a personal knowledge-creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises. The rhizome metaphor, which represents a critical leap in coping with the loss of a canon against which to compare, judge, and value knowledge, may be particularly apt as a model for disciplines on the bleeding edge where the canon is fluid and knowledge is a moving target.

Is your field of expertise or your area of work on the bleeding edge? You may want to read Dave’s article.

Update: Dave has published the entire article on his blog. Thank you :-)

PKM – Personally Managing Your Knowledge

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Note: More recent version here.

This post marks my first direct link to the newly created Work Literacy site.

Learning is an individual activity that often happens with and is supported by others. We may learn on our own but usually not by ourselves. Unless we live on a desert island, we learn socially. In looking at how we can make sense of the growing and changing knowledge in our respective professional fields (e.g. Pluto is no longer a planet), I see two parallel processes that support each other. One is internally focused, as in “How do I learn this?” and the other is external, as in “With whom can I learn this?”.

Internally, we go through a process of looking at bits of information and try to make sense of it by adding to our existing knowledge or testing out new patterns in our sense-making efforts. The process I have developed for myself is to:

  • Sort,
  • Categorize,
  • Make Explicit, and
  • Retrieve

I have called this my Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system, a term that is not original to me, and is based on the work of many others. There are also three externally focused activities that I believe complement our internal learning. These are to Connect, Exchange and Contribute. These internal and external activities are a way of moving from implicit to explicit knowledge by observing, reflecting and then putting tentative thoughts out to our “community”.

In the interest of not having an enormously lengthy blog post, the rest of this article is attached as a 5 page PDF. It elaborates each of the processes and describes some of the tools available. This is an extension of an earlier post, PKM – My Best Tool. Please feel free to share it.

Attached Document:

pkm-inside-outside

Performance, training, education and learning

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Updated 31 May

This thread starts with a presentation by Clark Quinn, which includes an examination of what he calls ePerformance tools. I think Clark’s work adds some clarification to the field and I agree with the intent to move away from the all-encompassing “learning” word, which is overused and misused.

Tony Karrer picks up on the ePerformance theme and notes:

I like the way he [Clark] stepped through the transition from thinking in terms of courses to thinking about broader uses of technology to support performance. His terminology around elements of what goes into ePerformance is a bit different than what I discussed in the learning circuits articles. The concepts are fairly similar.

This is followed by Stephen Downes take on the subject:

The main benefit of a term like ‘ePerformance’ for employers, I would say, is that there is no chance that learners will think that there is any intrinsic value to themselves in the transaction. Because if they did, then they would want to own the process, which is totally not what corporate e-learning is about.

I disagree with Stephen because a move toward performance and away from learning as the main objective of organisational interventions is much clearer. Performance is measurable, whereas learning is much fuzzier. organisations may say that they promote a learning culture, but all they really do is offer training. Sticking to performance also keeps the organisations out of the learning area

A performance-oriented intervention is focused on some type of desired performance that is made clear to both the organisation and the worker. The organisation wants stuff done and wants to be able to measure it. The worker wants to be able to show that it has been done and in return there is a financial transaction.

A focus on performance does not preclude organisation-sponsored learning activities. Many learning activities are obviously beneficial to the organisation, but usually not in an obvious and direct manner. Of course individual learning should be encouraged in the modern workplace where much knowledge work can not be finitely described in performance terms. But a focus on performance would have the advantage of avoiding “fire and forget” training/learning activities that waste everyone’s time.

There are many types of work performance that can be supported through tools, processes, incentives, training or other methods. A performance approach helps to ensure that what is done by the organisation is related to something that is articulated as beneficial to the organisation and the work that is done there. Human performance technology methods are one way of looking at these.

Learning is something that should be supported, but for the most part directed by the individuals. People who are not used to directing their learning will need support. I liken learning to morale. You cannot create an intervention, such as training, that will increase morale. Neither can you make people learn. You can have a work environment that supports individual learning, and there is no shortage of evidence that shows that this is good for the organisation as a whole.

My own working definitions of these terms [these are not robust, dictionary definitions, but just my own way of putting each term], which I often discuss here and with clients are:

Performance – something measurable and observable to achieve an agreed-upon objective.

Performance Support – tools and processes that support the worker in the desired performance, including, but not limited to, job aids.

Training – an external intervention, designed only to address a lack of skills and/or knowledge.

Education – a process with its main aims of socialization, a search for truth and/or the realisation of individual potential.

Learning – an individual activity, though often within a social context, of making sense of our experiences.

This means that training does not directly equate to performance improvement. Well-designed and conducted training can increase skills and knowledge if the individual is motivated and has the requisite abilities. So I would say that performance can be defined at the organisational level and training can be conducted by organisations. On the other hand, education is a social activity, usually run by the state or a non-for-profit institution. Learning remains an individual activity, with all of the variables of the human experience and much less clearly defined or controlled.

Organisations should get out of the learning business and focus on performance. Organisations can direct performance but they should only support learning. Individuals should be directing their own learning.

An ecosystem of knowledge

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Jon Husband dragged up an older post about blogging, that concludes:

Finally, an ecosystem of knowledge can develop that consists of the aggregated sets of links and content the participants in a blogalogue create. And this “body of knowledge” and understanding remains online, available to anyone who cares to become involved.

Advocates of blogging know how valuable our blog knowledge base is for our work and learning. I have over a thousand posts, several thousand comments and connections with hundreds of other blogs on a wide variety of subjects of professional interest ranging from schooling to the semantic web. The value of having a blog, reading other blogs, using a feed aggregator and making my bookmarks social and searchable has very tangible benefits. I’m actually more productive.

In spite of the obvious benefits, it’s still a challenge to get adoption of these tools and techniques with non-blogging professionals. Unfortunately, it takes more than a few blog posts to see how these can become a knowledge base or how they enable you to connect with others. The benefits take a while before they’re “obvious”.

After my first workshops on Personal Knowledge Management (using social bookmarks, aggregators, blogs etc., to make sense of digital information flows) I saw about 1% of participants actually try to adopt some of these tools. Perhaps three or four tools are too much at once, and any move to co-creating knowledge should start with the basics and only proceed to the next tool once there is a level of comfort. Here’s an idea/suggestion:

  1. Move your Bookmarks online using Social Bookmarks and some common tags for your group/team (1 – 3 months).
  2. Set up an aggregator for each worker, with a few pre-selected sites and have people Tag any posts of interest, using the Social Bookmarks that they now use (3 – 6 months).
  3. Create company or team multi-user blog focused on one area of interest or practice. Something like external training activities may be a safe place to start, with comments on how pertinent these were for those who attended (give it a year).

FrenchPod Launches

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As New Brunswick continues on its self-destructive path of eliminating early French immersion without a viable alternative, we now have FrenchPod, a [subversive] learning option that bypasses the politicized education system:

FrenchPod is a language training service designed around your needs, rather than the traditional constraints of language schools and publishers. Technology solves these problems and can make the learning of a new language easier.

We take the best pedagogical approaches of the classroom, layer in the community features of the social web and tailor a customized learning pathway for each student.

Note that networks route around obstructions with ease, and we now live in a networked world.

The science of learning

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Teaching may be an art but there is a mountain of science behind human cognition. Unfortunately it is often ignored or misunderstood in educational and training institutions. The local early French immersion debate sparked by our provincial government was a case in point that educational decisions do not seem to require scientific evidence.

Donald Clark has a post on 10 facts about learning that should have everyone in the learning profession nodding their heads:

  1. Spaced Practice [how to develop any skill is through practice and appropriate feedback]
  2. Cognitive overload [reduce the load and improve learning]
  3. Chunking [PDF on chunking techniques used by air traffic controllers]
  4. Order [such as learning a second language]
  5. Episodic and semantic memory
  6. Psychological attention
  7. Context
  8. Learn by doing
  9. Understand peer groups
  10. Murder the myths [e.g. learning styles, Bloom’s taxonomy]

To be considered professionals, we have to hold ourselves accountable for our practices. So why do we still have 50 minute classes; delivery of facts instead of affording time for practice; and a prejudice for text literacy, to name just a few of our common practices. Donald has highlighted only ten science-based factors influencing learning but there are many more hidden in the closet.

School Buses – A symptom of a larger problem

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CBC News reports that:

The P.E.I. government will be taking about a third of its school buses off the road immediately, and pulling the rest on Thursday and Friday after problems were found in some of the vehicles, the province announced …

All of the province’s older buses, 104 of the 320 vehicles, were being pulled off the road Wednesday. Students who had been dropped off at school already would be shuttled back home using newer buses and could expect long delays.

This is one symptom of our industrial school system. We are addicted to cheap transportation. Eighty years ago we closed down local schools and created factory schools that required a bus system to transport students back and forth each day, using large quantities of fossil fuels. Gas prices will continue to go up and therefore the cost of our aging infrastructure maintenance will increase. Industrial schools were premised on cheap transportation and centralised control. It’s time to consider decentralisation, especially since we have the information and communications technologies to support a wider variety of schools and administrative options. As with learning, one size no longer fits all.

The same can be said for the way that we structure our workplaces and our cities. We need to look at long-term options that let us live in a more environmentally sustainable manner. More people have to understand the scope of the problem and we have to keep pushing the issue, especially with politicians, planners and anyone in charge of publicly-funded organisations.

Walled Gardens

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Following up on Boring is Good, I think that the major barrier to use of these systems, whether collaboration or learning-oriented, is the “walled garden” framework. If I have “to go” somewhere, then that’s a barrier to use. E-mail comes to me, so it’s easy. Personally, I prefer using my feed aggregator to follow people and news. I use my blog and then perhaps Facebook to write once and publish to many. I find these tools EASIER than e-mail, but I’ve been using them for a long time.

For small groups, e-mail still works well, even though many of us have seen its limitations in terms of finding something buried in the pile. What will work are small applications or widgets that let the learner/user add what is needed at the time. The problem with most organisations (schools, businesses, universities) is that they force the learner to adopt to their system. And what makes it worse for the learner is that they cannot transport any artifacts from one garden to another. This begs the question, how can walled gardens enable cross-pollination?

A simple method for online collaboration for an educational institution would be to ask each student and staff member to have a blog. it doesn’t matter which blog platform is chosen and not everyone has to use the same one. For course work that requires posting of information or conversation around it, just decide upon a common Tag for that course, lesson or theme. Add in social bookmarks, wiki spaces for collaborative work and maybe a social network and let everyone use whatever plug-ins they need. All the institution needs to do is provide some aggregation, cataloguing and external indexing and there you have a real “Learning management System”. The testing function can be kept separate from the learning (as it should be), so there’s no need for all those tracking features.

That is how how your walled garden can become a resilient and growing ecosystem.

Photo by recursion_see_recursion

Skills 2.0

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Skills 2.0 is now part of this month’s Work/Learning Blog Carnival hosted by Manish Mohan.

My article in T&D, the journal of ASTD, was published this month, and if you’re a member of ASTD you’ll see it in the monthly journal or you can access it online. I’ve attached the article below.

skills21.JPG

This article covers issues that I often refer to on this blog and there is little new for regular readers. It is geared toward learning professionals who may want to know why it’s important to understand the Web for training and development.

Download PDF: L&D Skills 2.0

I submitted this post for the work/learning carnival because it synthesizes much of my writing about learning on the Web. The Web has changed the rules for teachers, educators, trainers and especially learners. How we react to this change is up to us.

Enabling learning is no longer about just disseminating good content, if it ever was. Enabling learning is about being a learner yourself, sharing your knowledge and enthusiasm and then taking a back seat. In a flattened learning system there are fewer experts and more fellow learners on paths that may cross. With practice, one can become a guide who has already walked a path. As fields of practice and bodies of knowledge expand, a challenge for learning professionals will be to change their tool sets from prescriptive to supportive.

Today I came across an excellent example of collaborative learning used by Ken Caroll in training language hosts:

At the moment, we’re in the process of inducting (training?) some new hosts for the podcast lessons – we’ll be launching FrenchPod and ItalianPod. Instead of simply telling them how to do that we’ve focused them on producing “artifacts”, that is samples of the lessons they eventually aspire to. We encourage participants to produce a much as possible – a lesson per day, for example. After that, we get together with them as well as practitioners of differing levels/experience, to reflect, discuss, and offer feedback.

The focus on doing has been literally very productive. Discussion are focused and concrete, the process of learning, visible. We blog as we go along, and we link to samples of the artifacts as we do so. We’ve also started recording the feedback sessions themselves and linking to those, too.