Confessions of an elearning skeptic

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!