Ray Sims and I appear to be walking similar paths. Ray has posted a diagram of a Knowledge Management Landscape. He asks where the mental models of his readers align or differ from his own.
I share Ray’s malaise about KM, OD, learning, and other performance improvers hanging out in their own private silos. Our old ways of looking at these things don’t mesh with today’s reality. The metaphor of the blind men and the elephant is apt to the current situation:
If you didn’t already do so, take a look at Ray’s schema before continuing to mine.
Maybe my vision is blurred, but I simply don’t get Ray’s diagram. It hits me as a jumble of tools, processes, technologies, and content. I don’t see the purpose. Here’s my first stab at an alternative:
A hasty explanation:
Learning and living are converging. If you have a flash of inspiration in a dream in your bed at home, is that work? If your negotiating skills course at work saved your marriage, what domain is that? I define learning as prospering in the environments that matter to you. This depends on a vast network of interconnections that interact unpredictably, hence the cloud shapes instead of a flowchart.
For our purposes, Learning/living is a people thing. I need to put a person in the picture because without it, any technology is like the tree no one hears fall in the forest.
We humans are not rational beings. We don’t see what’s out there; we see what we expect to see. You and I do not see the same reality. Folks, when you dig down far enough, the real world is a bunch of submicroscopic waves/particles whizzing around in vast open spaces. People don’t learn directly; they always learn though the disorienting haze of bias and filters. (This is the yellowish protective layer around the person.)
Networks describe the relationship between the person and the phenomena, perceived or real, that the individual senses. This is a two-way street. Our changes impact others. Learning is co-creation. It’s me and thou coming together to enrich our understandings. Conversations with other people are a noteworthy, high-bandwidth connection because their multichannel, responsiveness amplifies the message they carry.
Content is one way of looking at what we and others know. It may be the fruit of collective discovery. It may be remembering not to touch a hot stove. It may be what Google, or more likely Mom, tells me. One man’s process is another man’s content. The boundaries are loose, but in my model, content generally includes things like web sites, the library of science, intranets, search results, taxonomy, maps, lessons, narrative, business intelligence, and eLearning.
Learning, story-telling, communities, classes, conversations, performance support, and social networking are the channels through which content flows.
There’s also external change, the flow of new events and new ideas by which we mark the passage of time. Sometimes we sense a difference; often we’re oblivious. No matter how strong my cerebral reality-distortion field, it I don’t eat for a day, I get really hungry. The stream of change is important because while a model may stand still on paper, everything in the picture is in continual flux. This is a murky snapshot of an ongoing race.
Everything flows. And my reality is that it’s late and I’m tired.
6 comments ↓
I have to admit that Ray’s diagram doesn’t make sense to me either. The blue ovals are not in the same class (e.g. informal learning & library of science), so I don’t understand the relationships that this diagram is supposed to show.
Your diagram makes sense to me. It shows the individual’s relationship to sources of information/knowledge, filtered through individual biases.
An area of interest for me is the relationship (or lack of) between all the perspectives on your elephant. What is in common between KM, HPT, OD, etc and where are the major divergences. This could make for an informative diagram and might cause some interesting conversations between the fields. I don’t enough about all of these to show these connections, but perhaps someone will take this on as a thesis topic ;-)
For starters, KM, OD, etc. are all conscious attempts to improve human performance. I’ll try my hand at sketching this…
Harold (and Jay): I’ll admit to defeat on the diagram as I’m zero-for-three with Stephen, Jay, and now you…all folks that I have great respect for regarding opinion.
And, beating on the poor dead horse…what I was trying to get to, and obviously was too obtuse with, is a ‘class’ called “methods”. As in “the methods of library of science” and “the methods of informal learning”, etc. And then making an attempt at grouping some of the methods — e.g. among the methods of Learning & Development are e-learning (in the self-study sense) and instructor lead.
Ray
Thanks, Ray. Now I have the right perspective and will take another look :-)
[...] October update, prompted by feedback in comments here and at Jay Cross’s first alternative view: When viewing the ovals, mentally insert “the methods and goals of…” in front of [...]
A quiet word to Ray - ‘LEAD’ is a metal unless you mean the verb ‘to lead’ - LED is the past tense of ‘to lead’.
However, more seriously, do you not think that collaboration has a much more significant impact on learning processes than the diagram would suggest, and what of reflection? In today’s world are not all of these predominantly e-learning processes - so why not remove the ‘e-’ altogether?
Jay, I was very moved by many sections of your book. In particular I often quote your page on the ‘Googleplex’ when talking about the design of e-learning environments and in particular e-Portfolios. A most helpful book!
Ray T
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