Confessions of an elearning skeptic

The focus of my first set of readings was two papers by John Seely Brown, former director of the XEROX PARC facility:

Seely Brown, J. & Duguid, O. 1999, Learning, Working and playing in the digital age.
Transcript from a conference on Higher Education of the American Association for Higher Education.
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_edu/seelybrown/seelybrown.html

Seely Brown, J. & Adler, Richard P. 2008, Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0, Educause Review, January/February
http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823 

The thing that struck me the most about these two papers was that the broad concepts proposed by Brown in his 1999 paper are as relevant in 2008 as they were in 1999, and this is certainly a credit to his vision.  From my perspective the key changes since the 1999 paper are:

• The web has become almost ubiquitous and can be accessed from a plethora of devices from mobile phones to fridges making it an even more fundamental part of peoples’ everyday lives.
• The huge growth of online social networking tools such as face book and virtual worlds such as second life have allowed people to create vast networks of like-minded people, no matter how obscure their interests may be.  This provides access to a level of knowledge sharing beyond anything possible in 1999.
• The online collaboration tools outlined in 1999 were cutting edge technology available only to researchers.  Today anyone with a computer has access to powerful, but free, collaboration tools, e.g. my 10 year old son can contribute to one of the world’s most popular encyclopaedias (wikipedia).
• The rise of the ‘open source’ culture has made vast amounts of information and knowledge accessible to everyone who is interested and has broken down the traditional learning pathways by allowing us to learn the bits and pieces we need to perform a task.

To a large extent the core issues raised by Brown are being adapted although, to some extent, this adaptation is occurring more in the public domain than within traditional educational institutions and workplaces.  This gives rise to issues of control over what is being taught and learned and the quality of the interactions that are occurring.  Educational institutions and workplaces need to further embrace new technologies such as Web 2.0, Second Life etc to ensure that the learning they provide compliments and leverages off the learning that occurs in the public domain.  

From my perspective the key challenge is to ensure that access to these new ways of learning is available for all, specifically:

• that we bridge the gap between the information ‘rich’ and the information ‘poor’ by ensuring that all people have affordable access to the internet
• that we address the divide between the digital natives (those that naturally adapt to learning on-line) and the digital immigrants (those to which this type of learning does not come naturally) to ensure that people are not excluded from these exciting learning opportunities

In the past the challenge was to give people the skills to find information.  Now that they have access to an almost unlimited amount of information the challenge is instead to give people the skills to be able to judge the quality of the information that they find and be able to sort though all the information available to find that which is valid.

I found the example Brown cites in relation to Xerox technicians to be a classic example of the type of knowledge management challenge that is facing organisations such as the one I work for.  We have an aging workforce with a vast amount of corporate knowledge stored in its collective heads.  Our challenge is to capture this before this workforce departs, particularly the tacit knowledge which is generally not recorded.  The collaborative tools outlined in the Brown articles offer the means to do this, provided we can overcome the ‘technology barrier’ perceived by our older employees.

The other key challenges I face in my workplace are:

• The lack of ‘bandwidth’ in all locations, meaning the user’s experience varies from site to site.  Some sites do not have broadband access.
• The perception that this type of activity is not ‘learning’ and therefore is not measured as such in the minds of staff
• The perception that there are some things than cannot be learned this way
• The perception that this is the cheap version of learning that you get when it is too expensive to deliver face to face learning.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 3:59 am and is filed under Readings, Second Life, elearning research, elearning technologies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.