Learning is defined by the free dictionary as: “The act, process, or experience of gaining knowledge or skill.” and “Behavioral modification especially through experience or conditioning”. Looking at social learning / web 2.0 tool led me to realise that while tools as delicious can be extremely useful in an academic learning and research setting it is actually the more mundane social learning tools which hold the key to realising the theory of true organisational learning.

In his book “The fifth discipline” Peter M. Senge defines the four disciplines required to build the learning organisation:

• Personal mastery

• Mental models

• Shared vision

• Team learning

   

While personal mastery and mental models can be achieved on an individual basis, reaching a shared vision and team learning in today's large multinational corporates is virtually impossible without the help of technology. Senge states that “There has never been a greater need for mastering team learning in organisations than there is today” this is partially a result of the rate of change in every day life – a shared vision established today might not be relevant by the tomorrow, team learning is subject to the same speed of change but is also a victim of globalisation – where teams could be spread across different countries.

According to a recent Bersin & associates factbook report, approaches to learning using social networking tools “are still in their infancy in the U.K. But training organisations are realising that most learning takes place outside of the classroom or online course.” this realisation that MOST learning occurs OUTSIDE the classroom cannot be underestimated when discussing learning in the corporate space. In fact, some organisations “noted that they are working toward a 70 / 20 / 10 learning model, wherein 70 percent of the learning takes place through on-the-job experiences and practice, 20 percent through collaboration with others (e.g., coaching, mentoring, social networking), and 10 percent through formal learning interventions. This type of blended approach uses formal learning to build fundamentals. But the bulk of learning happens through carefully crafted informal learning activities.”

When looking at the multitude of tools that fall under the category of social learning the most used one in the corporate space is communities of practice. According to the aforementioned Bersin report the most used social learning technology is currently used by 24% of US firms – Communities of Practice. These communities are supported by a number of tools such as Microsoft sharepoint (with a number of plug-ins), ELGG etc.

In their article “Communities of Practice for Professional Development” Heidi Fisk and David Holcombe define a Community of Practice (CoP): “a place where people with similar interests connect to learn from and with each other — to freely share their knowledge, insights, triumphs and tribulations.” It is easy to see how the shared vision mentioned by Senge fits into such a community when it exists within a specific organisation. Team learning is a little harder to distil from this definition but if we take into account Senge's definition of it: “Team learning is the process of aligning and developing the capacity of a team to create the results its members truly desire.” then the ability to record and retrieve “knowledge, insights, triumphs and tribulations” means that the team (and in-fact the organisation as a whole) has gained knowledge which will modify the way the team (and therefore the organisation) behaves in the future.

Technological tools to store and retrieve this knowledge are critical since they are in effect the organisation's long term memory: when an employee wants to consult, for example, how the organisation dealt with a severe recession in the past he can bring it up in the internal system etc... this makes sure that learning takes place and not just an experience.

While the idea of social learning within educational organisations can prepare young learners for life in the workplace the concept comes into its own when used in universities and corporates: these are organisations which require long term memory to build on their activities in the past.

Bayne holds that “the discussion about the striated nature of the network is of limited relevance” I believe that this issue is of great importance, especially so in the corporate space (although the nature of such a discourse couldn't be further from that space).

It is useful to begin with definitions – when looking at the subject of the striated net I found the way in which Bayne applied the Deleuze & Gattari concept to be too polar. I believe that it is possible to define levels of striation. One simple way of defining levels can rely on continuity: the smoothest websites can be accessed using a web browser, in these the navigation toolbar is in the same place and visual appearance is more or less similar. They are followed by striations created by visual appearance (where the user needs a few seconds or minutes to reorient himself) an example of this could be the system is available to a student at the Edinburgh University:

The two levels which follow are websites which have walls between them (the need to log in) and then Internet environments which require users to use external applications to access them (for example second life). Even with the simple differences - every new environment (and with it the different visual layout) gives the user the feeling that he is in a new place which needs to be explored.

According to the the Nielsen Norman Group, a firm specializing in human-computer interaction, “intuitive equals familiar”. In other words, a space (or website) which we are familiar with is intuitive. The move between spaces on the web (and specifically between striated and smooth spaces) manifests itself as a 'difference' between the two spaces. Bayne refers to this difference: “such a difference is as likely to make the task of online learners and teachers more problematic, or problematic in unfamiliar ways”. As mentioned before, despite identifying this difference, Bayne finds the discussion behind it to be “of limited relevance”.

My personal experience, mostly in the corporate world, has taught me otherwise – This is far from being a purely academical discussion – IT managers go to great lengths to create smoothness in the striated corporate 'INTRANET': unifying the look and feel of the different components of the system and using such devices as 'single sign-on' to streamline the user experience. This is done in the corporate quest to achieve “enhanced efficiency and productivity” and to make sure that while the user is in the 'protected corporate garden' they are faced with the familiar. This ensures that new systems can be added relatively painlessly into the garden and as such, also affects learning. As such, these are the “virtual shanty-towns” that Bayne finds hard to see. It is the regulation of function and form but not of content which leads to users who operate in a smooth net where they are not bogged down by the differences and therefore do not waste time on getting to know the new place they have travelled to.

Internet users actually strive for the smoother – the number of services targeting striation is constantly growing: services such as iGoogle and Symbaloo are just two examples. These are personal portals which are dedicated to 'smoothing out' of the differences between a number of independent information sources and websites. Further examples can be found in the multitude of tools unifying instant messaging, e-mails and in boxes etc

However, even when outside the corporate space, striated spaces can have their benefits when used in an educational setting - specifically for younger children. Closed environments make sure that children are not exposed to inappropriate materials creating a “protective garden” where experiences can be had but without the inherent risk that results from the openness of the web. In fact, looking at the pedagogies that Bayne mentioned (Ulmer and LeCourt) a similar exercise to Ulmer's mystory could be very effective for younger children within the context of the striated space – preparing them to operate within the smooth one outside. In this context striated space can be a positive: enabling and empowering. These children will grow up used to using closed e-learning systems, they will not see themselves as “unfortunate... to be working within an institution in which the use of the virtual learning environment is compulsory”.

 

In an article by Donald H. Taylor in the December 2008 issue of inside learning technologies the author describes the process by which the early LMS systems were designed: “How did the vendors or the market researchers they employed, guess what functionality to include in their LMS1.0? They asked potential clients.” This process, carried out in the late 90s was applied to most other types of software (apart from those following a worse process – ask the developers to build them wherever they can). According to Taylor the result of this process was a “functionality wish-list based on solving today's issues piecemeal, not building something better for the future.” To me, this is the embodiment of: “you don't know what you don't know” – we invent things, solve problems and imagine based on what we know and experience: as a result we miss out on “the trick of doing things better or differently.”

Taylor provides the following table as an example:

PAPER-BASED APPROACH	TECHNOLOGY 'REPLICATION'	TECHNOLOGY EXTENSION
Provide manuals for instruction in the classroom.	Provide the same manuals in PDF online with no tutor support.	Divide resources into: A. Reference manuals, cross-referenced and with great searching B. Easily searchable instruction manuals C. EPSS/help systems D. Provide people for help were they can have the most effect.
Collect paper evaluation forms after every class and analyse obsessively.	Collect electronic evaluation forms after every class and analyse obsessively.	Forget evaluation forms and instead identify skill gaps prior to learning.
Collect paper-based performance / competency information once a year during an annual review and do little with it.	Do the same, but electronically.	Do the same, but use Internet technologies to make the information always in view and always linked to performance.

 

I believe that VLEs have suffered from a similar fate to that of the corporate LMS. However, we are now starting to see systems that use technology to extend, not fix, our paper-based everyday life. This 'extension' is critical to enabling learning in the information age where access to and contextualisation of information transforms it into knowledge.

These new 'systems' are not actually systems at all – the concept of content aggregation allows the user to 'pull' specific pieces of information and connect them together into a context relevant to him / her. Content aggregation systems have also gone from replication to extension; As explained in the mash-up wiki the two types of content aggregation systems – portals and mash-ups are different in that portals allow you to display information from different sources in the same way that this was exposed. In essence this is technology replication: by 'cutting out' the pieces of information that interests us (in the form of RSS feeds and similar) and glue them together on the same sheet we create the portal. On the other hand, the mash-up is actually technology extending an everyday task: it allows a user to take the raw data behind webpages (and other sources) and to re-contextualise it.

An excellent example of the more advanced content aggregation is the recent mash-up of tweets and Google maps: tweets that scored local snow out of 10, gave their postcode and used the tag uksnow were mapped on to a Google map of the UK essentially transforming raw data (tweets) into information by means of contextualisation. This can be found at: #uksnow Map 2.0 (see screenshot).

Moving forward, there is no doubt in my mind that the solution is, as mentioned by Wilson et al, standardisation. However, it is very important that we do not choose a rigid, limiting set of standards which are based on APIs and ensure that only students who have programming abilities can create a personalised environment. The answer to this could easily be products like Yahoo! Pipes or Apatar which rely on a visual model to facilitate the mashing-up. The one point on which I disagree with Wilson at al is that this is not the future: mashing up is happening every day by users who are not programming savvy. In fact, the ability to contextualise without external intervention opens up an additional option which current systems do not deal with – informal learning.

Tying the student's ability to contextualise raw data using today's e-portfolios will eventually lead to the more students centric approach that Ayala is pushing for. Personal development plans will define the path and competencies and skills rather than exam results will be the outcomes. This will of course mean that the targets system today in place will need to be abolished – that will happen eventually if not through intelligent governing than as a result of pressure from the corporate sector that needs capable employees.

At the end of the day, and probably in the same manner as they did in every century, schools and universities will have to equip students with the tools to learn and continue learning. From the introductory: enabling students to read through the basic – understanding how to access websites and how to evaluate their content and on to the intermediate: creating basic mash ups to the advanced: manipulating data in its raw form. Being the information technology the digital natives of tomorrow will move within the scope of consuming digital information and creating raw data (coming from researchers in universities and corporate). Anyone lacking the tools to process the never ending sea of data will be consigned to an underclass equivalent to today's illiterates.

This week we are looking at the theme of natives versus immigrants on the web, the technology being explored is twitter. I will leave the discussion about natives to my next blog but wanted to say a few words about twitter service/product which I have never felt comfortable with until now.

 

I will start with an admission – until this week I have never really used twitter. I explored it several times, run a few searches, looked at the discussions, but never contributed (or for that matter even set up a profile). My perception of it is is stronger than that of the BBC: “Twitter tweets are 40% 'babble'” (I believe that they were using a very lenient definition of 'babble'). In fact, a random screenshot taken from the twitter homepage shows the topics discussed:

 

 

So, while war rages in Afghanistan and Iraq, cars in the US are losing their breaks (Toyota) and MPs in the UK are asked to pay back their expenses the main topics being discussed on twitter are – entertainment and boy bands (4/7 topics) and technology (2/7 topics), I tried reading the last thread “OhJustLikeMe” but still have no idea what it was about.

 

On the very first page of “the University of Google” by Tara Barbazon, I found the following quote: “Students, in these ruthless times, desperately wants to feel something – anything – beyond the repetitive and pointless patterns of the casualised workplace and the selection of mobile phone ring tones.” I have to admit that after following a few of the threads appearing as the most trendy in twitter (and I am really not a fan of boy bands) I found little evidence of this on Twitter. If anything this reminded me much more of the nihilism that Dreyfus mentions in “on the Internet”; Twitter encourages you to get lost in the crowd, commit to nothing but have an opinion about everything as long as, it is in less than 140 characters. Whereas some of my fellow students found Dreyfus' book to be disparaging and depressing I was actually encouraged when I ran into this headline: “60% Of Twitter Users Quit After A Month”. Some of the metrics behind that report may be flawed but the comments to the article (and others presenting the same data) all circle around “what is twitter for?”

 

I have to admit that I found twitter to be almost disabling - it seems to encourage the culture of “looking for”, no new idea was actually developed during our chat, things written by other people were simply recycled. So, is twitter the human-based search engine that Dreyfus believes is needed? Not in my mind, simply because - if you do not know to follow then you cannot find the “good stuff”.

 

On a final note, while I do find twitter to be of very limited use in the classroom (and more so in the corporate training environment) I did find the conversation that we had as a group to be very engaging. Saying that, this had more to do with the content of the conversation rather than the medium it was done through. This, along with the Skype conversation we had the week before is pushing me in the direction of synchronous communication – what if we could replace the corporate training 'flip books' with an hour-long chat were people from different locations guided by more experienced employees gets to develop and understand, truly understand, ideas and information. This will never be a tool to cover compliance requirements but in the information economy could be a very powerful, differentiating, tool.

This week the Learning Technologies show (2010) took place at the Olympia exhibition Centre (The 27^th and 28^th of January). Working for a company that offers a number of products in this field I spent both days exhibiting at the event. This gave me an excellent opportunity to contrast where the corporate world is in terms of e-learning (technologies and usage) with how e-learning is used in the academic setting (having been on the course for two weeks now).

It seems as if the corporate world is still using the “traditional” e-learning of two decades ago: the number of companies still offering e-learning authoring (“click on the 'next' button 30 times and you are done”) is phenomenal. On the administrative side the main products being offered are LMS systems (which are mainly responsible for scheduling the presence of employees in classrooms or when they need to go through e-learning packages). In other words while interfaces have changed and systems have been speeding up there is little change in this field from the 1990s.

The buzz words of yesteryear – Mobile learning has now become more common (being used mostly for performance support and just in time knowledge) and so while many companies offer something in this field it is no longer a main attraction.

There is however some good news for corporate learning: the main product which seems to be making tracks is the e-portfolio. In fact, in a number of conversations that I have had during the show it seems as if corporates are finally starting to understand that being able to schedule employee A in classroom B at time C (with an LMS) does not actually mean that employee A has learned anything. Therefore, e-portfolio (and 'Talent management') systems are becoming of greater interest as they offer a mixture of skills and competency management (“what does the employee know” rather than “what does the employee need to learn”).

According to researchers such as Jay Cross most learning is informal. In such a case managing the skills and competencies of an employee rather than what they need to learn is very good news for learning in general. Over the next decade I believe that we are going to see the LMS become a subset of the e-portfolio system (it will still be needed to track learning for compliancy reasons).

The second trend that was obvious at the show is all about “social learning” on the one side this is closer to what is happening in the academic environment but it also acknowledges the way that younger employees (those currently joining the workforce) live their digital lives. The theme of “Google is today's main learning application” is a recurring one appearing in Barbazon's “the University of Google” and other sources. However, we have to remember that these books have all ready been out for a while (3 years in Barbazon's case) and the younger generation look at Facebook, MySpace and Twitter as their main port of call. In other words we have gone from learning from a teacher (with the book) to learning from an infinite library (searching it via Google) to learning from our peers. An example of this is given by Steve Johnson in his article “How Twitter will change the way we live”: describing an instance where a certain celebrity (Oprah) asked for help removing ticks from her dog.

I think that the main significance of this 'peer learning' to the corporate environment (and this is the main point which interests me personally) is that it brings closer the learning organisation as described in such books as Peter M. Senge's - “The Fifth Discipline” and Argyris and Schon's “Organizational Learning II”. Achieving the state of a learning organisation is not possible without the help of technology due to the simple reason of mass – the amount of data generated, updated, stored, queried and retrieved on a daily basis is by far too much for a non-technological system to handle. In his article “How Twitter will change the way we live” Steve Johnson claims that the value of twitter (and this apply to any system which generate great volumes of data) is not in the data it helps create but in the tools that allow users to manipulate and search it and so transform the data into information. I will be following closely the development of these systems for the corporate environment and their impact.

On a personal note, now that the show is finally over the weeks of preparation has paid off and I can finally returned (Begin) to make a more regular contribution to this blog and my studies in general. I look forward to this end to the reduction in day-to-day pressure.

i hope this links up ok

linking from hp

The interesting discomforts associated with exploring unfamiliar or previously rejected techniques for research are proving enlightening about my attitude to research altogether.  It's not that I'm anti research - though I am horrified by the distortions  to HE caused by the research assessment exercise - it's just that I only feel drawn to certain approaches to it myself.  I haven't properly thought this through before. 

Education has been my third choice of academic discipline - I changed from English Lit to Philosophy early as an undergraduate.  Research in those academic areas would probably not typically involve interviews, questionnaires, statistics or anything like that.  (None of these would have to be ruled out, though.) If I had progressed in either, "research" (perhaps scholarship?) would have involved working with texts and ideas, not people - though people could have been important as an object of study.

As an academic, the writing I have done has tended to be the low status "how to" stuff aimed at helping students.  I have several conference papers that I aim to redo to publish in academic journals, and I might also do this with some essays I've written for this course.  But my aim is to communicate ideas and possibilities rather than present facts that I have discovered.

I'm probably more interested in reinterpreting facts presented by others. Indeed, this would be appropriate for the interest I have in the changes that happen when we move activities online - I believe that they are no longer the same activities and our actions (including language use) are no longer the same as they are f2f.  This could have huge implications for education.

I think I'm feeling my way here to a philosophical stance rather than a social science one, if such a distinction is appropriate.  I've been reintroduced to philosophical ideas several times during the course and have enjoyed exploring them.  And of course Philosophy is also no longer the same online as f2f (nor the same as it was in the 70s!)

This discovery feels quite important, though when I read it over it doesn't seem to be saying much.

I'm a little bit behind with my reading for work as well as this course.  Coming to this blog is probably displacement activity (along the lines of it's not worth starting the reading now as I have to go for the train in 15 minutes).  However, I think it's worth recording how I feel about stats before I start doing them.  The fact that I only loaded my software yesterday (noting that I should have done it before the end of January) suggests some reluctance. 

I haven't done any statistics for a long time, but I can see that one of the things I'm reading for work contains some.  I don't think I'm phobic about statistics - I just worry about their use and the claims attached to them.  But it's actually better to know something about it all if people are likely to misuse statistics, especially if they are making spurious claims based on accurate statistics (but false premises). 

I did use numbers even in my very qualitative autoethnographic study - I created a concordance file in Word which helped me count my references to particular themes and thus see what a student "noticed" more frequently than other things.  It was a starting point when I had a lot of data and didn't know what to do next - it helped me to create categories and also a useful index.  It was of more interest to my examiners than I thought it would be - part of the argument about how you claim your data are data.

So I'll keep that in mind when I'm number crunching!  I've more to say on this but my time's up. 

I hate asking people for things - I'll buy a whole book of raffle tickets myself rather than try to sell any.  Yet I don't mind when other people ask me to buy a raffle ticket … or fill in a questionnaire. Not usually.

I didn't like being hounded by HESA to return their questionnaire, though - that felt intrusive, or would have if I hadn't already returned it at the second request.  I suppose it depends how many other things a person is juggling - in the last week, a few things I've agreed to do (write references, review papers, be an internal examiner, see students and many other things) have suddenly materialised rather too closely together.  If anyone sent me a survey just now, I'd be likely to ignore it (apart from people on the Research Methods module, of course).

When we ask someone to complete a survey for us, we have no idea what level of burden or anxiety it might be adding to an already overfull intray.  I suppose that is what causes me concern, especially if they see it as a pointless exercise for them.  I'm OK with piloting our group questionnaire on some of my colleagues - so I'm not recording a concern about that here.  While I was reading Robson this morning, I just became very conscious of my reluctance to use surveys in general, other than things that can be done very quickly (like the one-minute paper, as a classroom evaluation tool, for instance). 

When I have used the simple single open question surveys described in my last entry, these didn't put immediate pressure on any individual to stop everything to attend to my research.  Rather, I got a quick response from those who were interested in the topic.  That didn't feel as though it was being intrusive, though no doubt there were some who thought, "oh no - not another email from her".

I think that that my concern about being intrusive means that surveys are not for me.  It possibly also accounts for some of the idiosyncracies of my research history - and some other things that I'm still thinking about. But questionnaire fatigue is a real danger, especially among students.