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Collaboration as Learning? Collaboration IS Learning (or certainly should be!)

9 Jul

I’ve discussed in earlier posts my strong belief that learning is based in discourse. Through conversation, examination, doubt and reaffirmation we arrive to that place where we are confident in our understanding, our knowledge that we’ve learned something significant. Even if it is internal dialog, there is no substitute for point – counter-point.

It seems like a logical extension then, that the waves of tools, systems and organizational necessities to make collaboration more effective would take us a good distance towards learning workers and learning organizations.  But, for many of us, that has been far from the case.

The more often I speak into a triangular phone, the more I stare at the moving mouse of a screencast or web meeting, the less I feel like I am collaborating (or learning!). Why? Peter Senge, the godfather of learning organizations, had an interesting post the other day about this very topic. Real Collaboration Takes More than Meetings and PowerPoints dives into the heart of this conundrum.

The main takeaway of his post is that collaboration takes deliberate effort, and a workplace culture that demands it. Collaboration should not be, in fact cannot be, passive.

Rob Cottingham, via timesunion.com

Rob Cottingham, via timesunion.com

Collaboration is an act, a participation in a conversation that, if well-managed, drives to reveal facts and decision points. As Senge points out in one good example,

Practices for fostering thinking together need to be embedded in meetings as well. Whenever any of these networks meet, there are few “PowerPoint shows.” The vast majority of the time is spent in small working sessions and larger plenary dialogues….

Yes, our old friend dialog. It what makes the first Star Wars movie so much better than all the rest.

Hmmmm…. Active, engaged, participatory, the very opposite of passivity: Gosh, that sounds a lot like what trainers and Instructional Designers say all the time! Right, collaboration is learning when done well. If you have nothing to learn, and nothing to share, then why collaborate at all? The key is to manage the time, tools and cultural expectations to allow learning to happen.

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Informal Online Learning: What the dog saw

10 May

Since puppies sell (who doesn’t love a good dog story?), here I go. Please stay on the scent, there is a point about informal learning:

Forrest

Our dog Forrest, who definitely learned exactly what he could get away with (RIP).

Dogs are social animals, and they learn through interactions with other dogs and humans. I’ve trained a few dogs in my life, and the best advice I ever got from a good dog trainer was: “Your dog is learning something every day. Your job is to make sure he is learning the things you want him to learn.” 

People are also social animals, and nothing is more social than learning. Indeed, even the most basic learning is based in discourse. At times that discourse may be a conversation with one’s self, but we learn through conversations about facts, ideas and applied skills. (It’s why folks in isolation end up muttering to themselves.) That’s just how social animals roll.

Bringing it back to the professional sphere—Every day we continue to learn something about our jobs, our value to our organization, our place in the world. In formal learning environments (synchronous or a-synchronous), teachers, trainers and IDs work hard to hold learners’ attention and deliver what we want them to learn. 

But really, that’s the tail wagging the dog, because that accounts for only 5% of adult learners’ time in the best of circumstances. Informal learning is the nod to the other 95% of learners’ time. 

Think about it: The most admired and valuable members of your team have attained that status in large part through time and effort spent understanding how your organization works, who the key stakeholders and partners are, when and where to “pitch” ideas and ultimately how to get things done. He or she didn’t learn any of that in school. We are social learners, and the folks we admire are those who take the initiative to learn the skills they need to thrive on the job. (A lot like a well-adjusted dog, don’t you think?)

As e-learning professionals, we should strive to:

  • Build the structures for informal learning
  • Support a learning culture that “teaches” people that:
    • what they know is important
    • sharing what they know is valuable
    • we expect and support the time and effort they make to learn outside formal learning events
  • Facilitate, guide and coach the process as needed

Informal online learning might take the form of online Communities of Practice, ask-the-expert sessions, forums, shared resources and tools, social media and curation opportunities, user-contributed success stories, etc. There is no one way to do it, and every situation is different. The question that should gnaw at us is: “If our learning cohorts are not learning what we want them to learn, then what ARE they learning?”

For more on Informal Learning, see Marcia Conner’s Introduction to Informal Learning and Jay Cross’ post about it on his site. I’m also a big fan of Jane Hart, and she has a great piece on ID and social learning.

Creative Commons and Discovery Learning

10 Apr

I’m not a graphic designer. I’m a very amateur photographer, and a mostly-non-recording Imagemusician. So, I’ve had little reason to pay very close attention to the Creative Commons movement, and how it is changing the way creators and consumers of digital media interact.

But with a little help from articles like this, I’m realizing more and more that how we share, use, re-share and reference resources that are readily available and a mere click away has a lot to do with the way we learn today. And even more about what ways in which we’ll be learning in a very close-at-hand tomorrow.

It references back to ideas about learners as their own curators and creators instantly enhance learning. For adult learning and professional development, it will be interesting to see the ways this intersects with the move towards “big data” and the movement towards available data crunching and graphic display technology that has been the buzz in the business world recently.

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Leveraging expertise… and vanity

3 Apr

In reading about online learning communities, Communities of Practice, and the trend in social/informal e-learning, the common theme appears time and again: How can we make it sticky? How do we engage learners to take charge of their own learning, share it across organizations, locations, and technologies to create the kind of online learning community that is engaging, self-motivating and (most of all!) enduring?

It seems to me – and my thinking is constantly evolving on this, so forgive me if I contradict myself in a week’s time – that to build the scaffolding onto which a online learning community might take hold relies on two human dimensions.

First, insight. If a learner feels that what she does, what she knows, is solely wrapped up in their job function, she may have little reason to believe that what she has to share would be of any interest or consequence to others. What she lacks is the insight that her knowledge may be broadly applicable to a wide variety of potential learner/collaborators in dissimilar or even completely unrelated functions. She’s trapped in a silo and can’t see out.

The second dimension is vanity – in a good way. If a learner feels like he is an expert and couples that with pride (ego?) to share that expertise, that creates the backbone of social learning. Vanity here manifests as the confidence that others can benefit from what he knows.

The thing is, under the right circumstances, most everybody loves to be an expert.

Image

If you are working to support an online learning community, you may be lucky enough to have a number of folks who are will placed in the upper left of our simple matrix. However, if yours is like most attempts, you will have only a few if any who want to jump in. The trick, then, is to champion those who already reside in the upper left, and to nurture others to move in that direction. If you can get a conscientious fraction of your learning cohort to be active in sharing and learning (conscientious here means as interested in learning as they are in espousing), then you have a good shot at creating a self-sustaining social learning online community.

In the near future I will share some thoughts on how to move people up and over into the champion zone, but I welcome your thoughts if you’ve had experience (successful or not) in trying to make this happen. It is not an easy task.

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Communities of Practice: No more CoP out!

27 Mar

I’ve been thinking a lot about Communities of Practice (CoP) lately. In large part that’s because folks I work with keep asking me what I know about creating and supporting online CoP. My initial answer has been, “Um… not much.” Followed by the voice in my head with, “Why are you asking me about that?” and “That’s not an e-learning or instructional design issue.”

But both on practical and philosophical foundations I now think I’ve been wrong.

While I may not have used the term community of practice in the specific way it is used by my current colleagues, it has been part of my work all along. Learning is social: Learning itself is an act of membership in a community in almost all cases. Adult learning is also practical: Learning becomes knowing, knowing becomes doing.

It turns out I do in fact know about these ideas.

When folks ask me about supporting an online CoP, they are really asking me about are better ways to share best practices, disseminate new ideas and tools, support learner-generated peer learning, etc. I get it now! What you are asking for is some kind of framework to engage practitioners (learners) to facilitate their own learning. Now, that IS an instructional design and e-learning issue after all. Indeed, a CoP can be seen as part of continuum:

indiv - cop continuum

In the end, we need to be more attentive to learning solutions and less to training and e-learning in isolation (despite what job titles may say). CoP are definitely part of a learning solution.

I’ve still much to learn about CoP practice (Cop CoP?!), and even more about the new learning cohort I’ve been asked to support. But, after a few weeks of confusion and angst, I am much more at ease with my ability to contribute the positive outcomes that I’m being called on to deliver.

So, questions about CoP? Bring them on and let’s figure them out together.

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