» What I’ve Learned About Learning. ‘We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.’ ~Lloyd Alexander Post written by Leo Babauta. I am a teacher and an avid learner, and I’m passionate about both. I’m a teacher because I help Eva homeschool our kids — OK, she does most of the work, but I do help, mostly with math but with everything else too. I also teach habits, writing/blogging, simplicity and other fun topics in online courses. I’m a lifelong learner and am always obsessively studying something, whether that’s breadmaking or language or wine or chess or writing or fitness.
Here’s are two key lessons — both really the same lesson — I’ve learned about learning, in all my years of study and in trying to teach people: Almost everything I’ve learned, I didn’t learn in school; andAlmost everything my students (and kids) have learned, they learned on their own. Those two lessons (or one lesson) have a number of reasons and implications for learning.
Why Corporate Training is Broken And How to Fix It. Why Corporate Training is Broken And How to Fix It Executive Summary 3 Where Corporate Learning Came From 3 Corporate Learning Today 5 Training is not the same as learning 6 Corporate Training Is Broken 7 Senior managers are dissatisfied 7 Chief Learning Officers know training is not working 7 Managers feel training has scant impact 8 Real learning takes place elsewhere 8 Workers are disgruntled 10 Training is out of sync with the times 11 The Collaborative Organization 12 Collaborative Culture 15 Collaborative Motivation 16 Collaborative Infrastructure 17 Collaborative Learning 18 What’s the hurry? References 21 Executive Summary Corporate training is broken. The world around corporate training has changed. Traditional training departments cannot build courses fast enough to keep up with the speed of change. Industrial organizations are morphing into collaborative organizations.
Where Corporate Learning Came From The 20th Century was the great age of training. Corporate Learning Today Collaborative Culture. The practice of a learning technologist. I recently undertook a study to help me go my job better. I was about the practice of learning technologists. More specifically I looked at the processes involved with supporting UK Higher Education academic staff in their design of online or blended courses. I did this by researching my own practice and how I supported my colleagues in their learning designs by studying through learning design processes I have been involved in recently.
Through study of the research literature, themes emerged which impact on the design process and it was under these headings that I organised the write-up. Here is a summary: What has positive influence on the professional practice of a learning technologist in supporting online learning design? The main areas impacting on the professional practice of a learning technologist supporting academics in online course design are: contextualisation, the socio-historical context, academic perceptions/attitudes and the role of the learning technologist. Www.jarche.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/76080422commpractice.pdf. Howard Rheingold on how the five web literacies are becoming essential survival skills. Howard Rheingold isn’t too concerned about whether Google is making us stupid or if Facebook is making us lonely.
Those kind of criticisms, Rheingold says, miscalculate the ability humans have to change their behavior, particularly when it comes to how we use social media and the Internet more broadly. “If, like many others, you are concerned social media is making people and cultures shallow, I propose we teach more people how to swim and together explore the deeper end of the pool,” Rheingold said Thursday. Rheingold was visiting the MIT Media Lab to talk about his new book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, which examines how people can use the Internet not just to better themselves, but also society as a whole. Rheingold has a longer online history than most, going back to The WELL, one of the first online forums back in the 1980s. Instead, Rheingold wants to focus on how we use these tools and how users can become more mindful and literate. It’s not about knowledge transfer. Danah Boyd: Putting people first » Whether the digital era improves society is up to its users – that’s us.
TouchingCulture. The key to informal learning is autonomy. Five Trends to Watch in Educational Technology. Preparing for the future of work with PKM. Hugh Macleod, one of my favourite cartoonists and someone who really understands the networked economy, recently asked; How Do You Best Prepare For The Creative Age? Image: Gapingvoid.com Chris Jablonski at ZDNet identifies five trends driving the future of work as we get virtual, online and global [I think he misses "local" though, especially as energy prices continue to increase]. Trend 4: Adaptive lifelong learning the norm -”Ten years from now, relevant work skills will be shaped by the continued rise in global connectivity, smart technology and new media, among several other drivers.” This is linked to the Institute for the Future‘s graphic of Future Work Skills 2020 identifying six disruptive shifts as well as the skills necessary to deal with them: Sense-makingNew media literacyVirtual collaborationCognitive load managementNovel and adaptive thinkingSocial intelligenceTrans-disciplinarityComputational thinkingCross Cultural competencyDesign mindset.
Who Is Managing Your Learning? PKM Workshop: learning out loud. Sometimes it helps to learn out loud – LOL. That’s why we commit to formalized activities. They can help us try something new. The Personal Knowledge Management workshop, starting this Monday, 23 April, provides a loose framework to try out some new ways of learning for yourself, but with a small group of people to help and support you. It’s only two weeks long and you can do everything at your own pace. This online workshop on adapting to the networked world of work includes tools, tips & techniques from two facilitators who have been connecting, communicating and collaborating online for over fifteen years.
The workshop is for anyone looking to understand the digital reality of the connected economy. Here are some comments from our previous workshop: “There is a saying that “when the student is ready the master (teacher) shows up” and that is how I see this course.” Registration Link. Webinar recording: In conversation with Mark Britz. A mini-course on network and social network literacy - howardrheingold's posterous. The Complete Educator’s Guide to Using Google Reader.
Love it!? Hate it!? Doesn’t really matter what you think of the new Google Reader interface….. What does matter is they’ve changed some of the Google Reader functionality educators like to use. So here’s my essential guide for what educators now need to know about using Google Reader. Click on the following links to learn more: Intro to RSS and Google Reader One of the smartest things you can do is learn how to use RSS well if you plan to work online with your students.
RSS isn’t dead, isn’t hard to learn and is an essential time saving tool for reading latest students’ work in one location quickly. RSS is an acronym which stands for Really Simple Syndication. In simple terms, RSS is a simple and effective way of keeping in touch when new information is added to a website without having to visit the website to check for new updates. The most common RSS reader used is Google Reader. How it works is you subscribe to your favorite website using the RSS feed in Google Reader. Please note : 1. 2. 3. Network Learning: Working Smarter. “In the period ahead of us, more important than advances in computer design will be the advances we can make in our understanding of human information processing – of thinking, problem solving, and decision making…” ~ Herbert Simon, Economics Nobel-prize winner (1968) The World Wide Web is changing how many of us do our work as we become more connected to information and each other.
In California, Ray Prock, Jr. (2010) uses a Web-based note system to store messages, manage his financial risk and stay on top of the multiple factors necessary to run a successful dairy farm. He is constantly learning as he works and has found a method to keep up, thanks to the Internet. For many, however, keeping up isn’t easy. The amount of information flowing through the Internet today is measured in exabytes, or billions of gigabytes. This information overload has a direct impact on workplace learning. We need to re-think workplace learning for a networked society. Network Learning Seeking: Using Filters. To learn, we must do. As I was preparing to start our online PKM workshop last night, I came across one of the best articles that I have read in a long while that reflects the value of what the PKM framework supports.
Anne Adrian, in My own serendipitous opportunities, talks about her experiences in online sense-making. In 2007 I started blogging with the intention of learning and trying to determine if blogging and other online tools could be useful for my organization.I did not ask my organization, I just did it. At that time it could have ended badly for me because I was blind of what was possible.
Blogging and connecting led to Google Analytics, Delicious, Flickr, Slideshare, Twitter, and now Google Plus. There are many applications that have been useful for a short while and then either their usefulness to me (not to all) died or they died (Google Wave, Buzz, Friendfeed). “Chance favours the connected mind”, says Steven Johnson.
Perspectives in Personal Knowledge Management. Academic Stuff that Simply Make Me Smile. The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart - Alexis Madrigal - Technology. Remember the good old days when everyone read really good books, like, maybe in the post-war years when everyone appreciated a good use of the semi-colon? Everyone's favorite book was by Faulkner or Woolf or Roth. We were a civilized civilization. This was before the Internet and cable television, and so people had these, like, wholly different desires and attention spans. They just craved, craved, craved the erudition and cultivation of our literary kings and queens.
Well, that time never existed. Check out these stats from Gallup surveys. All this to say: our collective memory of past is astoundingly inaccurate. So, then why is there this widespread perception that we are a fallen literary people? After I posted this chart, Twitter friends made some good points: 1) This chart does not establish that high-quality literature readers have increased. Point four comes with an embedded assumption that the books of the past were, on average, better than the ones today. Loose Hierarchies, Strong Networks. When I wrote that the only knowledge that can be managed is our own, I wanted to highlight that command & control methods do not work well in this network era that is replacing the industrial/information era.
In our increasingly complex work environments, we should should take the advice of Snowden & Kurtz who recommend “loose hierarchies & strong networks” as shown in this image by Verna Allee. While a certain amount of hierarchy may be necessary to get work done, networks naturally route around hierarchy. Networks enable work to be done collaboratively, especially when that work is complex and there are no simple answers, best practices or case studies to fall back on.
Real business value today is in complex and creative work. Just imagine if the idea that the only knowledge we can manage is our own informed our organizations and our approach to learning and development? What would education look like? What would training look like? What would knowledge management look like? Finding and following on online networks - Apr 18. This is the third webinar in the three-part series "Getting online information to come to you," but stands alone, so feel free to attend, regardless of whether or not you participate in the others. Whether it’s figuring out the next book to read, movie to see, or contractor to hire (for example), we each have trusted advisors we turn to with questions on a particular topic. Social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+) can be used to find people whose opinions you trust or who have similar interests. By tuning in to what they are talking about and engaging with them, we can discover information that we would have had difficulty finding on our own.
This webinar will explore how online networks can be used to find interesting people and topics to expand your knowledge and discover hard to find information. Creating your own Learning Network - Apr 4. This is the first webinar in the three-part series "Getting online information to come to you," but stands alone, so feel free to attend, regardless of whether or not you participate in the others. Today we face a problem, not of information scarcity, but an over abundance of information. Getting the online information you want to flow to you is critical to keep pace with the explosion of online knowledge. This webinar will focus on mapping out your own objectives and begin to introduce tools to get you started.
The main tool highlighted will be Google alerts for search and news. You’ll learn how to customize alerts for your particular topical, geographical, and individual interests. Learning in today video: Link to video: Other webinars in the series:- RSS feeds and feedreaders ( - April 11, 2012 11AM EST - Finding and following on online networks ( - April 18, 2012 11 AM EST. Alerts - Monitor the Web for interesting new content. A New and Simple Way to Measure Social Media ROI - Forbes | Cooperative Extension Evaluation. Tailoring Twitter: The ROI of Curating Content on Twitter. April 25, 2011 Liz published this at 7:37 am What You Share Defines You Last year, I started experimenting with curating content on Twitter. I had three good reasons. I realized that Twitter was no longer an extension of blog, but had become it’s own thing. To say it paid off would be an understatment.
Here’s how I did that … Build a Stronger Network by Curating Content On the Go Don’t think for a minute that I’m exaggerating about the “minutes a day” part. I curate in the morning. Two Ways to Curate on the Go Actually, I’m not quite as obsessed as all that. When someone shares a great article on Twitter that I don’t have time to read right then, I send the that article to my Instapaper account. Sometimes I tweet what I find at that very moment. The ROI of Curating Content on Twitter The discipline of reading regularly and curating what I prized had more ROI than I’d ever have guessed.
The content I curated defined me more clearly and differently to the people who follow my Twitter Stream.