Mathemagenic

This is the topic that surfaces again and again: heated discussions about 'pushing' people into self-organised learning with Sebastian Fiedler, recurring "personal KM is about taking responsibility" with Ton Zijlstra, one more "parallel thinking" line discovered with David Gurteen last week... And finally this line from an article on adult learning pointed by Cindy Hoong:

Efforts to lure people to new educational technologies and to promote a culture of life-long learning resemble a case of preaching to the converted, according to a new UK study.

Familiar?

Why there is such a high degree of autodidacts or self-imployed people between bloggers I know?

Do we put put the cart before the horse providing people with great methods and tools when they don't have a need for them? Not surprising that methods and tools stick only with those already converted.

I don't know how to put these things together in a coherent text, but I can make a bulleted list:

• There is no "sponsor" for my research on PKM as there is no "sponsor" for life-long learning. Organisations want agility from their people, but they care more about todays and tomorrow's profits than about employability of their employees in 20 years.
• The change is up to an individual.
• Change starts from a need more often than from an opportunity (= unless you are an early adopter having good tools is not enough to change way of doing things).
• Change is painful and unless there are visible threats not many people would go out of their comfort zone.
• If you want people to take responsibility for their own lives you have to respect their choices. Including the one about not taking responsibility :)

Coming down to personal KM:

• Taking responsibility for one's own life (or work :) is a main challenge for personal KM: it's both rewarding and risky (more).
• It's not about methods and tools, but about attitude change. Attitude change is difficult and there are many ethical issues around (more). 

Fun of playing with forces of middlespace :)