Learningscaping 101

Patterns in the Clouds: Some Thoughts on Not Being Completely Wrong about PLEs is a charming position paper by Mike Malloc about personal learning environments, the wrong-headed notions about Learning Objects, and the importance of small pieces, loosely joined:

Respect the web2.0 way

In any work on PLEs, let’s be very careful to learn from the simplicity, clarity, user-centricity, restraint and attention to detail that characterise web2.0. The good systems-effects only emerge when usage becomes rich and plentiful - and that depends on an ecology in which the individual parts are simple, focused and easy to get along with, and in which the interoperability architecture makes very lightweight demands on its citizens. Small pieces, loosely joined. Small APIs. Small steps. And remember to make it shiny :o)

Exactly! We’ve got to get away from courses and into ecologies. It’s the platform, not the program. It’s pull, not push. It’s more important to establish a healthy, productive learning environment than to keep running in the hamster-cage of knocking out one course after another. I call these learning environments learnscapes because I’ve yet to hit on a better term for the design, play, and nurturing involved in pulling this off. You can no more “control” learners than you can command plants to grow.

People are so accustomed to the usual way of doing things that they prefer training that doesn’t work to informal learning that does. “How do we know they learned if we can’t test them?” they ask. And I reply, “By seeing if they can do the job.”

The communication challenge

This stuff is subtle. What seems obvious to us is unknown to most policy-makers - indeed it’s little-known or misunderstood by most professional ed-tech developers. In my experience, people do not “get” the new opportunities until they have made fairly serious use of some of them.

I’m preparing for tomorrow’s unworkshop. We are learning by doing. Monday’s topic is Personal Knowledge Management. When you realize that what people need to learn is forever changing and that accomplishment is the measure of success (not repeating yesterday’s knowledge as codified in some book), the learnscaping approach becomes a no-brainer.