Jay Cross helps people work and live smarter. Jay is the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning. He wrote the book on it. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix.
The future is people, not technology by Jay Cross Recently, I called for the abolition of corporate training departments. Now some instructors and traditional instructional designers see me as a job threat. They needn’t worry. Enlightened e-learning requires more people, not fewer. Ten years ago, venture capital firms issued lengthy reports explaining why e-learning would take the world by storm. Their underlying economic argument was cost-cutting: less travel, fewer facilities and no more salary expense for instructors. It was a classic industrial age proposition: Replace humans with machines. That first round of e-learning largely failed for precisely this reason. You can’t remove the humans from learning. Companies should embrace network-supported informal learning because it works better, not because it reduces labor costs. People learn more efficiently at the time of need, in the context of work, from people in the know and through virtual conversation. When my colleagues and I advocate cutting back on workshops and classes in favor of building “learnscapes,” we aren’t suggesting firing the instructors. Rather, we recommend redeploying them in new capacities, serving as connectors, wiki gardeners, internal publicists, news anchors and performance consultants. There’s no cookie-cutter formula for assigning these new roles and responsibilities. An active community of practice is a different animal from a bottom-up knowledge management network or a corporate news channel. New communities have different requirements than old. In their book Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities, Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith describe different community orientations in terms of meetings, open-ended conversation, projects, content, access to expertise, relationships, individual participation, community cultivation and service context. Digital Habitats posits the role of the community technology steward. Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs. A steward’s initial task is to shape a vision consistent with the community’s orientations. The steward then selects the simplest technology to advance the community as both the technology and the organization progress. Digital Habitats also assigns these duties to the technology steward: • Bringing new members up to speed with the community’s technology. • Identifying and spreading good technology practices. • Supporting community experimentation. • Assuring continuity across technology disruptions. • “Keeping the lights on” (including backups, permissions, vendor payments and domain registrations). Internet Alliance’s Clark Quinn sees the need for a learnscape architect who nurtures the health of the learning network for collaboration, communication and learning opportunities. More a leader than a technician, the learnscape architect is the network champion who carries the vision, monitors metrics, promotes network participation and encourages continuous experimentation. Mzinga’s Dave Wilkins describes several production roles. Producers manage the contributions of others, drawing out the best in them while also opting not to include contributions that aren’t as good. Moderators help ensure an environment of high trust by ensuring that people play by the rules. Expert moderators may vet the accuracy and clarity of information in their domains. Yet other moderators seed discussions to channel conversations in ways that might provide insight to the organization. Reporters and bloggers unearth what is newsworthy and document it for the community. These tasks won’t happen by themselves. Furthermore, people throughout the organization will need to share the burden of helping everyone learn.Distributing learning throughout the social fabric of an organization requires storytellers, mentors, bloggers, community elders, schedulers and editors. We’re all in this together. Some instructors will continue to instruct, but they will increasingly do so with network support and in smaller bursts. It’s a better use of their time. Face-to-face instruction packs a punch but is difficult to scale. Economics dictate that traditional instruction will play a diminishing role in corporate learning. Traditional instructors and instructional designers are ideally suited to excel in these roles. They understand how adults learn and how to transform information into learning. It’s important for corporations to benefit from their learning people, not give them pink slips
In Sao Paolo, I had the please of sharing the stage with Paul Pangaro, a cyberneticist who teaches design in several degree programs in New York.
For seven years, Gnomedex has given me insight into the soul of geekdom. Chris Pirillo’s yearly confab brings 300 very savvy folks together for a couple of days in the Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle. Year after year, Chris has introduced people who are working to improve human circuitry. It’s a people’s conference: the entry fee is a mere $300. And it’s a venue like no other. This is where geeks who care rally to express and promulgate their values.
Some will come and some will go
We shall surely pass
When the one that left us here
Returns for us at last
We are but a moment’s sunlight
Fading in the grass
C’mon people now,
Smile on your brother
Ev’rybody get together
Try and love one another right now
(Stephen Stills)
Participants chose the topics, host the discussions, and report the findings
Resources
Jay’s Notes on Unmeetings
Kaliya Hamlin, Identity Woman
Kaliya’s Unconference Blog
I love this TechCruch article from salesforce.com’s Mark Benioff.
The future of our industry now looks totally different than the past. It looks like a sheet of paper, and it’s called the iPad.
It’s not about typing or clicking; it’s about touching. It’s not about text, or even animation, it’s about video. It’s not about a local disk, or even a desktop, it’s about the cloud. It’s not about pulling information; it’s about push. It’s not about repurposing old software, it’s about writing everything from scratch (because you want to take advantage of the awesome potential of the new computers and the new cloud—and because you have to reach this pinnacle). Finally, the industry is fun again.
Last week I gave presentations to more than 60 CIOs in various meetings throughout America’s heartland. My message to them: We are moving from Cloud 1 to Cloud 2, and the iPad is the accelerator. Many of them haven’t even made it to Cloud 1—some are still on mainframes. They are working on MVS/CICS, or Lotus Notes, and they have never heard of Cocoa, or even that there is now HTML 5. This is unacceptable. The next generation is here. The iPad that shows us what now is really possible—and that we all need to go faster. Unfortunately, some CIOs would rather retire than go faster.
Cloud 1 ————————————->Cloud 2
Type/Click———————————->Touch
Yahoo/Amazon—————————–>Facebook
Tabs——————————————>Feeds
Chat——————————————>Video
Pull——————————————->Push
Create—————————————->Consume
Location Unknown————————->Location Known
Desktop/notebook————————->Smart phone/Tablet
Windows/Mac——————————>Cocoa/HTML 5
What’s most exciting is that this fundamental transformation—cloud + social + iPad—will inspire a new generation of wildly innovative new apps that will change entire industries.
Student-centered learning, that is, putting students first, is in stark contrast to existing establishment/teacher-centred lecturing and careerism. Student-centered learning is focused on the student’s needs, abilities, interests, and learning styles with the teacher as a facilitator of learning. This classroom teaching method acknowledges student voice as central to the learning experience for every learner. Teacher-centered learning has the teacher at its centre in an active role and students in a passive, receptive role. Student-centered learning requires students to be active, responsible participants in their own learning.
Traditionally, teachers direct the learning process and students assume a receptive role in their education. With the advent of progressive education in the 19th century, and the influence of psychologists, educators have largely replaced traditional curriculum approaches with “hands-on” activities and “group work”, which the child determines on his own what he wants to do in class. Key amongst these changes is the premise that students actively construct their own learning. Theorists like John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky whose collective work focused on how students learn is primarily responsible for the move to student-centered learning. Carl Rogers’ ideas about the formation of the individual also contributed to student-centered learning. Student centered-learning means reversing the traditional teacher-centered understanding of the learning process and putting students at the centre of the learning process. Maria Montessori was also an influence in center-based learning, where preschool children learn through play.
From TIP
A person interested in becoming rich might seek out books or classes on ecomomics, investment, great financiers, banking, etc. Such an individual would perceive (and learn) any information provided on this subject in a much different fashion than a person who is assigned a reading or class.
Principles:
1. Significant learning takes place when the subject matter is relevant to the personal interests of the student
2. Learning which is threatening to the self (e.g., new attitudes or perspectives) are more easily assimilated when external threats are at a minimum
3. Learning proceeds faster when the threat to the self is low
4. Self-initiated learning is the most lasting and pervasive.
Also not in common with Freud is that Rogers’ theory is particularly simple — elegant even! The entire theory is built on a single “force of life” he calls the actualizing tendency. It can be defined as the built-in motivation present in every life-form to develop its potentials to the fullest extent possible. We’re not just talking about survival: Rogers believes that all creatures strive to make the very best of their existence. If they fail to do so, it is not for a lack of desire.
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