Confessions of an elearning skeptic

In my researching this week I came across an interesting paper by Nick Bostrom, the Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.  The paper, entitled “Are you living in a computer simulation“, puts forward the argument that there is a good possibility that we are already living in a matrix-like computer simulated reality! So forget Second Life, you’re already living it!  There is a wealth of other thought-provoking reading on Nick’s web site, www.nickbostrom.com.  Enjoy, though it might freak you out a bit!

Continuing on from my previous post: Reflecting on learning community design (one), I now turn my attention to how my reading of the Wenger Article will affect the way I go about designing my own community.  The key considerations I take from the Wenger article are:

(1) That it is vital that I consider the perspective of the participants because this prespective(s) will have a distinct affect on how they interact with the community and, as a result, what learning actually occurs.

(2) It is vital that the participants in the community engage with that community.  This engagement needs to be encouraged through the creation of value in the mind of the participant, both that they value the learning that is occurring and that their knowledge and expertise is valued by the other participants.

(3) That any chosen design must support the flow of information to all participants that could benefit from it.  This includes ensuring that separate discussion on the same topic cannot occur without some form of linkage between them.

(4) The learners must be able to shape the direction of the community and that this ability must be fairly shared between experienced participants and those who are less experienced.  Structures that allow ‘experts’ to dominate will have a tendancy to focus too much on the preservation of knowledge, to the detriment of the challenge of this knowedge and the creation of new knowledge.  On the opposite side, neither should the community be dominated soley by ‘novices’ as this will have a tendency to bog the community down.  A good design will spread the experts evenly across it and provide a good mix of experts and novices.

(5) A good design should give all users equal power in relation to the ability to contibute and to create new groups, forums etc.

(6) A good design should encourge the community members to be members of other communtities and should faciliate access to information from outside the community.  By doing this it will avoid the community becoming too isolated from the broader world and ensure that ideas can flow from outside.

After the success of my presentation to staff in relation to Web 2.0, I was invited to conduct the same presentation to a broader forum, comprising staff from learning and development functions across the organisation.  Due to this broader audience I took the oppportunity to present my ‘bold vision’ for elearning within our context, giving a practical example of how everyday events would be be ‘better’ once elearning was implemented. This presentation went well and has generated a lot of interest in elearning and how it can benefit the entire organisation. There is also still a lot of apprehension about how educators will engage with the technology and whether or not they have the skills to be able to create elearning.  This is something that will have to feature strongly in the future selling of this concept and in implementation plans. 

 The seend continues to grow and all indications are that a broad range of areas are looking to capitalise on this new opportunity which will make the process of gaining organisational commitment that much easier. 

The next reading I have been tackling relates to the design of learning and comes from Etienne Wenger’s “Communities of Practice” (Wenger, E. 1999, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge University Press, USA).  This reading makes the key point that ‘learning cannot be designed: it can only be designed for - that is, facilitated or frustrated”.  How is this accomplished through the online community that I have been participating in (The Content Wrangler Community)? Wenger suggests that learning architecture needs to reflect four key dimensions, and I will use these dimensions to evaluate the effectiveness of the Content Wrangler Community:

(1) Participation vs reification

Participation deals directly with the concept of providing a structure and processes for learning, whereas reification is more about giving learners the ’space’ to negotiate thier own meaning.   Good design will balance these two.  I believe that The Content Wrangler does this well, because it provides a rigid structure of clearly divided groups and forums but, within these, provide a space where the participants can direct their own learning and collaborate to negotiate meaning as well as draw upon past learning, and interpretation.

(2) Preservation and creation of knowledge:

This dimensation is about balancing the preservation of meaning and the need to direct future learning towards emerging needs.  Once again, I feel that the Content Wrangler does this well (or will do once it has been around for a longer period) as its structure allows for the easy access and recording of past knowledge, learning and interpretations, but has the flexibility to allow the groups and/or forums to go off on a tangent it the need arises without the treat of losing all that has happened in the past.  The ability for all participants to contribute to the collaborative processes also means that there is always the ability to challenge past interpretations and knowledge and, by doing so, create new knowledge and interpretations.

(3) Spreading of Information:

This is about a design’s ability to faciliate the spreading of information.  The Content Wrangler does this well, in most cases, as its groups and forums are based around the principle of sharing and collabroation.  One issue with the design, though, is that the division of participants into groups is not necessarily conducive to the spread of information across groups and it is possible to have mutilple versions of the same information present without any linking threads.

 (4) Home for identities:

A group learning environment is one where each learner can have an identity.  The Content Wrangler certainly meets this need by allowing the participants within the community to create, and shape the direction and definition of, the individual groups and forums.   As such it is not a rigid, pre-defined environment.  Instead it is an environment that can be shaped and directed by the individials within it, but in a consistent and pre-deinfed way that allow all users to participate in this process.

The next step is to examine how my understanding of this reading will inform my work of designing a learning community for assignment 2.  This will be the focus of a separate post.  Watch this space!

As I have got into blogging one question has crossed my mind on a number of occasions: does the time that you do a post have any impact on how many people read it?  Jake Luciani took a particular interest in this very question  has undertaken an analsyis to determine the answer.  According to Luciani’s analysis Tues - Friday between 10am - 2pm (Pacific Standard Time) are the “hot times” for popular blog posts.   This means that to maximise the readership of my posts I need to post between 3am and 7am Wednesday to Saturday (thanks to www.timeconverter.com for your assistance with this calculation).  I’m not totally convinced that the added readership justifies staying up all night for, but it is yet another thing to consider when operating in the global commnity that is web 2.0. You can read the full analysis on Luciani’s site, 3rd rail.

Just a quick update on the presentation I gave to my colleagues in relation to the elearning and web 2.0 technologies (see Ponderings Eight).  Despite the small audience the presentation has started a lot of healthy discussion within my workplace, with people starting to think about how they can use elearning and web 2.0 to broaden the impact of their training.  There is also a great deal of support for the del.icio.us trial.  So, all told, things are progressing very well.  The next step will be to broaden the audience for my presentation and get some individual areas coming up with some concrete ideas for how they are exploit the benefits on offer with web 2.0.  As always, watch this space.

As promised in Ponderings Nine here is my report on day two of the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD) conference in Sydney.

The second day was certainly focussed more on ‘convential’ types of classroom/face-to-face learning with the key session of the day a presentation by Dr Michael Marquardt on Action Learning. With my current focus on elearning I spent a lot of time pondering the significance of Action Learning to the elearning sphere, as most information about Action Learning implied a face-to-face activity rather than something done digitally. During my trip home on the train I started to draw some threads between Action Learning and Learning Communities that I think are valuable in my study of online Learning Communities. Like Action Learning, online Learning Communities:

• Place more value on the questions than on the answers. Most threads start with a question and the better the question the better the outcome of the thread.
• Place learning as a key outcome of the process. True learning communities are not about showing-up your knowledge, but on contributing and learning from others.
• Require participants to ‘listen’ and treat each other with respect.

With this in mind I’m keen to read further about action learning and see how it can inform my study of learning communities.  I bought Dr Marquardt’s book ‘Leading with questions‘ so I will be studing that closely too to see how I can apply it to my learning and my context.

Well, the conference is over for another year and I’m keen to exploit my post-conference enthusiasm and try and implement a few of the key things I have learned. Fingers crossed.

Just a quick update on my learning community participation.  I joined a couple of intresting new groups this week, one about blogging and one about leading and managing change.  The blogging group had some interesting forums in relation to the platforms people used for their blogging and how people managed their time in relation to regular blogging.  Having got a little blogging under my belt I felt comfortable putting my ten cents worth in on both these counts.   The managing change group is in its infancy, but included an intresting article in relation to change which struck a real cord with me as it mirrored my own past experiences in relation to the inability of many plans to realise that change is largely a human activity and is as much about people as it is about processes and infrastrucutre.  Being on the verge of preparing to introduce elearning into my workplace this was a valuable reminder of this important issue.

In the spirit of my own continuous learning I attended the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD) national conference in Sydney today.  Given this I thought I would dedicare a couple of posts to sharing my learning with you all.

Given my study of elearning, and my desire to introduce it into my workplace, my selection of workshops for today was focussed on elearning and its effective use and introduction.  Here is a summary of the key things that I learned today:

• It is important to distinguish between elearning as a product and learning as a process and to not confuse the two.  Good elearning creates learning but not all elearning does this.
• The importance of informal learning cannot be downplayed and we, as learning and development professionals, must learn how to harness it.  This requires us to move from being learning deliverers to being learning enablers (hence the title of this post).
• Elearning can assit us to be learning enablers when it is used to make knowledge accessible and encourage the creation of knowledge.  Many web 2.0 technologies are directed towards these aims.

Thanks to conference presenters Martyn Wild and Cheryle Walker for sharing their knowledge and expertise in relation to the above points.

A couple of interesting resources were also used during the conference that I thought would be worth sharing.  The first is an excellent presentation about change and preparing people for the world of the future.  The presentation is called Shift Happens and I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it:

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The second resource comes from Jane McGonigal a games designer and researcher who has defined the “10 collaborative Superpowers“.  This is an interesting set of new skills that will be vital in the world of the learning enabler:

That’s enough food for thought for one day. The conference is on again tomorrow so I’ll post again then.  I better make sure I give an accurate account as my lecturer is one of the workshop presenters (g’day Anne ;-)).

This week I will be presenting an item to our monthly staff information session about technology in education.  Why?  Well we are embarking on the introduction of elearning within my workplace and, as part of the planning process, it think that it is vital that staff start thinking about how they want to ‘deploy’ elearning within their particular training unit. To kick this whole process off I want to provide some food for thought.  My presentation will focus on learning communities, wikis and social bookmarking (via del.icio.us).  Why these technologies?  Well I wanted to use technologies that were a little outside the square but not technologically impossible and these seemed to fit the bill.  All of them offer great scope for new ways of learning without fear to hitting too great an IT wall! My inclusion of del.icio.us was also guided by my desire (see Ponderings Four) to get staff to centrally capture the online learning that many of them do.  Hopefully my planting will bear a bountiful harvest, only time will tell!