SocialLearning

Social learning

no time, no learning

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I do a fair bit of public speaking. But I doubt that much of it has changed anyone’s behaviour. I may have presented some new ideas and sparked some thinking. With a one-hour lecture, you cannot expect more. Yet a lot of our training programs consist of an expert presenting to ‘learners’. Do we really expect behaviour change from this? That would be rather wishful thinking. Learning is a process, not an event.

‘Setting aside any reservations about what they teach, religious systems have long emphasized what the secular world tends to overlook: if it’s important, it warrants learning repeatedly.

“By contrast,” [Alain] de Botton writes, “modern education adheres to an implicitly bucket-like theory of the mind: one pours in the contents and, bar accidents, they’ll stay there pretty much across a lifetime. That’s why we’ll think nothing of earnestly declaring a book a favourite—and deigning to read it only once.”

Bringing a truth to mind repeatedly gives it an enduring, three-dimensional existence in your head, by reaching you in every mood and every context, in every season, both at times when you’re enthusiastic about it, and when you’re tired of hearing it.’ —Raptitude 2018-01

To learn a skill or get better at one, you have to practice. Deliberate practice with constructive feedback is the key for long-term success. This is how I learned to write. Before I started blogging my writing was quite bad. Even though I had two university degrees, I was not proud of my written work. But through blogging every day and now several times a week, I became a better writer. I also read a lot more and saw how others expressed themselves. I modeled their good practices. Yesterday Heather McGowan wrote that I am, “a gifted communicator who provides clarity with simple images and carefully crafted words.” That made my day. It has taken me over 3,000 blog posts to achieve this clarity.

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bias thwarts innovation

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My recent blog post on our future is networked and feminine has had more online attention than any other post I have written in the past two years. I was even asked to change the title, something that has never happened before. For me, the topic is not new, and I have presented these ideas to live audiences many times. I just wanted to get the ideas written out and the references linked. It is a fact that many of our current institutions and workplaces are not favourable to women.

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professional learner’s toolkit

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Jane Hart describes a Modern Professional Learner’s Toolkit as having several components: resources, networks, devices, etc. I have used Jane’s framework to look at my own practice.

Browser & Search Engine: I use three browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome) and two search engines (StartPage & DuckDuckGo). Each browser has different security and privacy settings, depending on what type of resource I need to access. For example, some sites will not give you access if you use an Ad Blocker. On Chrome I have no extensions, and only use it to access LinkedIn and Google services, which I know track me. On Firefox I have several privacy tools.

Trusted Web Resources: CBC News provides me with a Canadian perspective while The Guardian and BBC give me different ones. I also read Spiegel in English. I ensure online security by using a password manager: 1Password.

Curation Tools: My aggregator of choice is Feedly and I keep social bookmarks in Diigo. Long reads go to Pocket.

Course Platforms: I have not taken a formal course for a very long time.

Social Networks: My preferred conversational and sharing network is Twitter. I am using LinkedIn more frequently but have stopped posting to its Pulse platform and keep all my posts on my blog. I left Facebook many years ago.

Personal Information System: My blog is my main personal information system, hence this post. Other sense-making and reflection is done offline, with handwritten notes or text files kept in an active folder.

Blogging Tool: This blog is built on WordPress open source software, designed and hosted by Tantramar Interactive.

Preferred Office Suite: I use the Apple iWork suite: Keynote especially.

Communication & Collaboration: Zoom for meetings and video conferencing is my preferred platform and I have a Pro account which is well worth the $15/month price. I am also active in communities of practice hosted on Slack and SocialCast.

Smart Device: I have one iPhone, and not even the latest. The most used app is the camera.

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perspectives on new work – synopsis

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Perspectives on new work: Exploring emerging conceptualizations, edited by Esko Kilpi, was released by The Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra in August 2016. I received a copy last week and found it a comprehensive read on the future of work. The PDF is here: Perspectives on new work – Kilpi.

It is a long read (132 pages), so I have taken the opportunity to capture some of it, for my own memory, and perhaps to save other readers some time. Here are a few of Esko’s observations [my emphasis added].

  • The organization is not a given hierarchy or a predictive process, but an ongoing process of organizing. The Internet-based firm sees work and cognitive capability as networked communication.
  • Creative learning is for us what productivity meant during the industrial age. Creative learning is the human edge that separates us from machines, also in the future.
  • Human life is non-deterministic, full of uncertainty, unknowns and surprises. Creative learning is the fundamental process of socialization and being human. For a human being, the number of choices or moves in the game of life, in any situation, is unlimited.
  • Perhaps, in the future, it will no longer be meaningful to conceptualize work as jobs or even as organizational (activity) structures in the manner practiced by the firms of today. Work will be described as complex patterns of communicative interaction between interdependent individuals.
  • If the (transaction) costs of exchanging value in society at large fall drastically as is happening today, the form and logic of economic entities necessarily need to change! [Ronald] Coase’s insight [that the firm exists to reduce transaction costs] turned around is the number one driver of change today! The traditional firm is the more expensive alternative, almost by default. This is something that he did not foresee.
  • A networked business increases its intellectual capital as the nodes of the network do the same. The network acts as an amplifier of knowledge, but the demands on the worker grow. Being skilled is not enough. The challenge for the knowledge worker is to take responsibility for the value and growth of her human capital and to plan her “investment portfolio” carefully. Work should always equal learning.
  • Post-industrial work is learning. Work is figuring out how to define and solve a particular problem and then scaling up the solution in a reflective and iterative way – with technology and alongside other people.
  • The future of work has to be based on willing participation by all parties, and the ability of all parties to protect their interests by contractual means.

principle of networked management

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cities and the future of work

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Note: This post is based on several earlier ones. These have been edited and synthesized to a single composition in advance of my sessions in Helsinki on 3 November 2017 with The National Foresight Network and the Prime Minister’s Office where we will discuss the transformation of work and its consequences. This post looks at the roles of cities, and city regions, in a network society.

Tribes & Networks

“According to my review of history and theory, four forms of organization — and evidently only four — lie behind the governance and evolution of all societies across the ages:

  • The tribal form was the first to emerge and mature, beginning thousands of years ago. Its main dynamic is kinship, which gives people a distinct sense of identity and belonging — the basic elements of culture, as manifested still today in matters ranging from nationalism to fan clubs.
  • The institutional form was the second to emerge. Emphasizing hierarchy, it led to the development of the state and the military, as epitomized initially by the Roman Empire, not to mention the Catholic papacy and other corporate enterprises.
  • The market form, the third form of organization to take hold, enables people to excel at openly competitive, free, and fair economic exchanges. Although present in ancient times, it did not gain sway until the 19th century, at first mainly in England.
  • The network form, the fourth to mature, serves to connect dispersed groups and individuals so that they may coordinate and act conjointly. Enabled by the digital information-technology revolution, this form is only now coming into its own, so far strengthening civil society more than other realms.”
    —Overview of social evolution (past, present, and future) in TIMN terms, David Ronfeldt

There are strong indicators that society is heading toward a quadriform structuring (T+I+M+N) with network culture dominating in many fields: open source insurgencies, Blockchain financial transactions,  political manipulation through networks, crowdfunding, etc. This is also bringing tensions between the old Tribal, Institutional, and Market forms against the emerging Network form.

“The more entrenched an older form, the more difficult it will be for a newer form to emerge on its own merits: This mostly occurs where tribal or hierarchical actors rule in rigid, grasping, domineering ways; but it may also apply where pro-market ideologues hold sway … Examples may include governments rife with a clannish tribalism, militaries wallowing in lucrative business enterprises, and ostensibly capitalist market systems fraught with collusive, protectionist cronyism. The stronger are tribal/clan tendencies in a society, the more likely are corrupt hybrid designs. A society of myriad monstrous hybrids is likely to be a distorted society, even a mean-spirited one.”
—Explaining social evolution: standard cause-and-effect vs. TIMN’s system dynamics, David Ronfeldt

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our collective learnscape

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In 2009 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that journalism is no longer the sole domain of professionals [my highlights].

[96] A second preliminary question is what the new defence should be called.  In arguments before us, the defence was referred to as the responsible journalism test.  This has the value of capturing the essence of the defence in succinct style.  However, the traditional media are rapidly being complemented by new ways of communicating on matters of public interest, many of them online, which do not involve journalists.  These new disseminators of news and information should, absent good reasons for exclusion, be subject to the same laws as established media outlets.  I agree with Lord Hoffmann that the new defence is “available to anyone who publishes material of public interest in any medium”: Jameel, at para. 54.

Source: Grant v. Torstar Corp., [2009] 3 SCR 640, 2009 SCC 61 (CanLII), par. 96, <http://canlii.ca/t/27430#par96>, retrieved on 2017-09-19.

It is not just our perception of what is news and what makes a journalist that has changed but our collective understanding of what is literacy and what should be the focus of education. Our relationship with knowledge is changing as we move into a post-print and post-channel era. It is becoming critical for democratic societies to have educated and engaged citizens sharing their knowledge, given this new age of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity (UCaPP) to our digital surround. This new literacy makes us all journalists. The network now decides who has the authoritative voice once reserved for professional journalists.

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Sensemaking and the power of the humanities

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What is Sensemaking?

Christian Madsbjerg, in Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm, describes sensemaking as an interaction with fellow humans in the real world.

“Sensemaking is practical wisdom grounded in the humanities. We can think of sense making as the exact opposite of algorithmic thinking: it is entirely situated in the concrete, while algorithmic thinking exists in a no-man’s land of information stripped of its specificity. Algorithmic thinking can go wide — processing trillions of terabytes of data per second — but only sense making can go deep.” —Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking, p. 6

Why Sensemaking?

“Too many of the top cadre of leadership I have met are isolated in their worldview. They have lost touch with the humanity of their customers and their constituents and, as a result, they mistake numerical representations and models for real life. Their days are sliced and diced into tiny segments, so they feel they don’t have time to wander around in the mess of real-world data. Instead, they jump into a problem-solving process and a conclusion without understanding the actual question.” —Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking, p. xiv

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cities as learning platforms

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In 2008, CEO’s for Cities recommended a more inclusive way of supporting learning in the community. Basically, the city becomes the learning platform, not just for schooling but for other community support activities, such as policing and heath care.

“The current offer is that education is schooling — a special activity that takes place in special places at special times, in a system where most of the goals and curriculum are set for the student, not by the student. Attainment against those standards leads to a system of grading that has a huge bearing on life chances.

The new learning platform [the city?] would offer learning all over, all the time, in a wide variety of settings, from a wide range of people. Pupils would have more say and more choice over what they could learn, how, where and when, from teachers, other adults and their peers. Learning would be collaborative and experiential, encouraging self-evaluation and self-motivation as the norms.

The principles and ideas developed for the redesign of education and learning city-wide could also apply to policing, crime and safety, health and well being, care for the elderly, carbon usage reduction and sustainability, and culture and creativity.” —Remixing Cities (PDF)

For the past century we have compartmentalized the life of the citizen. At work, the citizen is an ‘employee’. Outside the office he may be a ‘consumer’. Sometimes she is referred to as a ‘taxpayer’. All of these are constraining labels, ignoring the full spectrum of citizenship. As the network era connects people and things, society needs to reconnect with the multifaceted citizen. This is the connecting role the city can play.

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future hedging

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“The future of work will be based on hacking uncertainty and hedging risks through post-blockchain smart contracts, learning and social capital.

The main question is perhaps not what skills we should have in the future, but how we hedge the risks that are inbuilt in our world, our unique knowledge assets, the know-what, the know-who and know-how of our life.” —Esko Kilpi

In hedging the future of work, Esko Kilpi describes three areas of work that need to be negotiated by knowledge workers in the digital network era.

  1. Long-term Collectives
  2. Short-term Communities
  3. Flash Networks

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the missing half of training

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The training industry is based on models that were developed for the military. The Systems Approach to Training includes the ADDIE [analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation] model, with variations used throughout industry. Robert Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction inform much of instructional design. Gagne’s early work was in military training. Other models were developed in the second half of the 20th century but they mostly remained in line with their military roots. One model for instructional design that I promote is Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping. It’s a welcome change, but is focused on individual training.

In the military there is much more training than individual, skill & knowledge-focused, course work. There is also ‘collective training’. Collective training is what military units do when they are not on operations. Collective training is run by operators, not trainers, and is informal, social, with an emphasis on simulation. Types of simulation can range from expensive highly technical combat mission flight simulators, to distributed war games, or command post exercises involving thousands of personnel.

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