Recognizing patterns

I’m in the midst of reading five books about different aspects of a informal learning. Let me describe the books, why I find them important, and how they relate to one another.

Most people in business have probably finished reading Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics by now; I am not among them. I’m about a third of the way into the book. It’s a very important book: networks are the defining principle of business and culture. The trouble is, it’s not telling me much I didn’t already know. (Informal learning could probably be called networked learning.)

I’ve re-read about half of Classic Drucker. Drucker’s words are business poetry.

• Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong.
• Development of talent is business’s most important task–the sine qua non of competition in a knowledge economy.
• Enterprises are paid to create wealth, not control costs. But that obvious fact is not reflected in traditional measurements.

I’m conceptualizing my next book, tentatively named the Informal Learning Fieldbook. When a case example comes with an estimate of business value, I plan to use Drucker’s logic, not the accounting department’s, to quantify it.

A client suggested I read Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability: What we find changes who we become.

• Information literacy is no longer just a library issue. It is the critical issue for the twenty-first century.
• The Web lets us find our own way. We choose our links and our leaders. We decide where to go, what to believe, and who to follow. Our garden is a maze of herods and memes, where what we find shapes who we become.
• The brain doesn’t compute the answers to problems; it retrieves the answers from memory . . . the entire cortex is a memory sytem. It isn’t a computer at all.

Actually, I have read Ambient Findability cover-to-cover but I have not gone back to mine its wisdom. “Findability” has joined my list of what 21st century learners need to know.

David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder arrived day before yesterday. David is a wonderful, drole author who simplified very complex ideas so the rest of us can understand them. I’ve read only two chapters, but I’m thoroughly enjoying it. Going digital  is fueling the findability of everything.

And finally Wim Veen’s Homo Zappiens: Growing up in a digital age. This delightful book about how digital natives learn is the first I’ve read that is neither condescending nor fawning. Wim tells it like it is:

• Homo zappiens learn by playing, exploratory play. Their learning starts as soon as they play simple computer games and learning soon becomes a collective activity as problems will be solved collaboratively and creatively, acting in a global community of interest.
• “Chalk and talk” classrooms are not appealing to Homo zappiens. It simply contrasts too much with their way of working. The contrast with their out of school life is too big: no control, no connectivity, no media, no action, no immersion, and no networks. As a learner in school they feel forced to be passive and listen to a teacher who explains.

Traditionalists fear that kids who don’t devour Shakespeare, the calculus, and English composition are headed for hell in a handbasket. I’m not so sure. The next generation is already teaching adults how to use technology. Their collaborative strategies may work better in the world of tomorrow than the do-it-yourself approach I practiced in school.