My Educa Gestalt

Online Educa is over for most of its 2,000 participants, but I’m only about half way through. In the context of unbounded, informal learning, events are but a component of a broader learning process. At Online Educa I was gathering input and finding new nodes to follow up. Now my mind is sorting through what’s memorable and what’s mental clutter. New neural connections are forming. I awoke today with fresh insights.

As is the case with formal and informal learning, we subconsciously decide how much time to devote to reflection. We don’t decide so much as hand the controls over to our auto-pilot systems. We delegate how much we invest in reflection to gut feel rather than reason.

On the airplane to London yesterday, I decided to spend a little more effort than usual in reflection. I jotted down a list of words for takeaways. I’m telling people about my interactions with the event. I’m going to share my free associations instead of the categories in which the information was presented. I’m looking at my conference photos on Flickr to rekindle forgotten conversations. Here’s a grab bag of thought snips from the last few days:

The mantra of open source/open architecture/open networks is on the lips of the cognoscenti and the bloggers. Freeform, centerless, pull: numerous organizations are working on what I call Unworkshops. Many areas where we Americans consider ourselves thought leaders are the same or better on this side of the ocean.

Many academics do not buy into this bottom-up model at all. In fact, the concepts are too alien to understand. Faculty will ask me what constitutes informal learning. I reply that it’s learning without a curriculum, it usually occurs when needed rather than on a schedule, and it rarely ends with grades or a certificate. It’s how you learned to speak your first language. Okay, they say, but what’s informal learning?

People are so accustomed to the Cartesian worldview that they can’t process something holistic. They seek a magic formula, a list of three steps, a rigidity that’s not there, and uncertainty in an uncertain world. Sometimes they are satisfied with examples.

A Dutchman shared with me the results of an exhaustive study of how people learn at Sara Lee. His team from that 20% of learning was formal and 80% was informal. (Whew!) I’ll post more about this when I receive a packet of information from him.

Alfred Remmits gave me a demo of Learning Guide, a performance support and learning platform on steroids. I was amazed my its clean design and the unmuddled thinking behind it. I’ve often heard the phrase “Start with the end in mind,” but I’ve rarely seen people actually do that. In one incarnation, Learning Guide begins with a picture of how to do the particular job at hand. Then it provides performance support, learning objects, or direction to an expert, depending on the need. Bob Mosher was sufficiently impressed that he left Microsoft to work with Alfred, whose work is well known in Europe but little known in the US.

In a large panel session, a drone from Blackboard delivered a clueless presentation on eLearning 2.0. His version of eLearning 1.0 is what most of us think of as pre-e traditional delivery. Hence, eLearning 2.0 makes the jump to learner-centric. Huh? eLearning 1.0 relied on instructors. Rather than define eLearning 2.0, this guy chose to read us a passage from Stephen Downes, accompanied by the wordiest PowerPoint slide imaginable. This charade ended with pictures of shrink-wrapped boxes of Blackboard’s 2007 product line. (Educa forbids self-promotion from speakers.) I wanted to ask, “You guys have a patent on that stuff yet?”

At a special interest group lunch on collaboration, Jo Smedley described new approaches being deployed at Aston University. The university used to face a situation of students arriving on campus unprepared which led to dissatisfaction and a high drop-out rate. They now offer a pre-school prep session online. The students have designed the system themselves. Now students arrive with proficiency (and expectations) that are prerequisite to success.

Another person at our table wanted advice on how to bring eLearning into her high school. I suggested this was the wrong question. “Why would you want to bring eLearning into the school?” She told us it was to make the learning more engaging. Noting that I have seen corporations fritter away months disagreeing with one another about their definition of eLearning, I suggested that the question should be “How can we make the learning more engaging?” Then pick the medium for the message.

Teemu Arina is a Finn who started his company eight years ago, at the age of 16. We had met online when I was giving a webinar in Helsinki last winter (over the net from sunny California). Now I’m not only far away from Teemu geographically, I am two and a half times his age, yet we see the world through the same eyes. I just jumped over to his blog to find a URL, and his blog entry for Educa talks about reflection, just as I do here. If you ever need consultation on collaboration and/or web 2.0 tools (and can’t reach me), call Teemu.

Back to the other way of seeing the world, that old mistake that knowledge resides between the covers of musty books on library shelves, I reflect on the impact of one’s perception of time. A good friend and I were talking about the transformation that comes with age. We’d both felt ourselves becoming wise. Our time horizon has expanded. So many things are transient. Walking along the street at midnight that evening, I reflected on the gravity of the storefronts and cobblestones around me. You could imagine that Berlin had been here forever. And yet not long after I was born, we carpet-bombed this place into pebbles. Very few things here are more than 60 years old.

On Friday, Kevin Wheeler gave a presentation on the last 120 years of learning and development and the conclusion that we’re coming back to the beginning. Using a visual timeline drawn by Eileen Clegg, Kevin took us from the 1880s, when the manufacture of Colt firearms initiated an age of markets and the start of a dance of education and industry that’s with us today. (Industry takes the lead.) Compare learning to manufacturing automobiles. We went from handmade one-off models to one-size-fits-all, to ersatz customization (red or blue? two doors or four?), to complete personalization (you configure your car on line and receive exactly what you were asking for.) The car-building website notes, “Build your own car. We relinquish all power to you.” The conclusion is that a wave of natural (or informal) learning is coming back. Kevin and I plan to do a podcast on these topics.

Lots of scuttlebutt about immersive learning environments and Second Life. More than one person was uneasy with the Second Life form that requests that you “Describe your real self.” I opined that while the 3D immersion environment is inevitable, Second Life has too many rough edges to cut it as a learning environment. Business Week’s recent coverage described a bug that occurs when sixty people take their avatars to the same space simultaneously: their clothes disappear. Hmm…. Not in any corporation I know of.

Richard Straub gave a moving presentation at the conclusion of IBM’s private dinner at the Jewish Museum. As an Austrian, he could lay the Holocaust on the Germans, but the indelible lesson for all was never to let people stop thinking for themselves. Never again.

Talking of the evolution of IBM, of which the next morning Yael Ravin would describe as a collaborative organization, Richard said “IBM didn’t know what an end-user was until we acquired Lotus.”

Peter Isackson, the Montreal Band, Gunnar Bruckner, and many others described the importance of learning through communities of practice. Everyone I spoke with agreed that Etienne Wenger’s term communities of practice falls short of the mark. Community conjured up the image of a small town; practice sounds like doing things over and over until you get them right. This is not what Etienne meant at all.

Peter, Pierra, Isabel, and others brainstormed alternative labels but didn’t find what we were looking for. We were looking for a word that implies these traits: social, dynamic, proactive, identity, membership, voluntary, standards, and professionalism. Then we considered such words as club, web, network, guild, troupe, cast, society, nucleus, band, parliament, equipe, mastery, court, pool, work-pub, work club, work team, and enthusiasts. Dynamic guild works best for me. What do you think?

Educa is not over yet, at least for me. However, it is a beautiful sunshiney day and I am staying with friends in an utterly charming part of England. We’re about to head to the pub for lunch and site seeing. And I’ll see you afterward.