[This post was in drafts for a while; posted on the actual date of the workshop, so the participants can find it.]

When I was asked to facilitate a discussion on reflective learning and weblogs at the workshop on Informal learning and the use of social software in veterinary medicine I hesitated: while reflective learning is part of my practice, at the moment I’m far from the theories about it or from facilitating reflective learning in educational settings. Well, at the end it worked – we didn’t go that far into the reflective learning itself, but talked about uses of weblogs for learning of students and practitioners.

A few things that might be useful for the participants and may be some other people.

Reflective learning: I googled for stuff to read on it to brush up my knowledge without getting to far into the theory and found this best practice paper useful – Learning journals and logs, reflective diaries

All kinds of things on blogging that I wrote for practitioners:

• What pragmatists might want to know about blogging – things to consider before starting blogging (what weblogs are good for and which challenges blogging brings)
• Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas
• Blogging for knowledge workers: personal networking
• Facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments

• Searching for knowledge as constructing personal learning experience
• Understanding real value of blogging: time, connectivity, need for reflection
• Being researched…

Interesting things from today:

• video diaries on student learning habits
• blogs as portfolios – time, tools and common format for digesting
• “presumption of competence”
• formative vs. summative – not only assessment of competencies, but also assessment of research
• taking responsibility for choosing learning options vs. can you judge learning options about things you don’t know
• role of intermediaries (people and tools) to help navigating learning landscape

Those pages are likely to move, but I keep links here for a while:

• ProgrammeLifelongLearning
• GroupWorkArea
• Resources

Relevant pieces from earlier blog posts:

• On responsibilities/competencies for being self-directed (including learning)
  • Preaching to the converted: PKM is not about methods and tools, but about attitude change
  • Personal knowledge management in KM Magazine
  • Learning: communities vs. courses (4) – learners’ skills and motivation
• On formal/informal learning and supporting both

• Converging knowledge management, training and e-learning: scenarios to make it work (more here)
• Early version of my PhD proposal – for an overview of interplays of formal/informal learning and necessary support
• Supporting informal learning

• BlogTalk: who owns narrated experiences?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/04/07.html#a1758; comments are here.

• It takes courage to blog
• Saturday readings…
• ID for e-learning

Ross Mayfield:

Bottom-up phenomena has accelerated in recent years because of social software. A relatively simple decentralized pattern of enabling more connections and groups to form has complex results. These results (for example: open source, the long tail, heterarchical organization, emergent democracy, wikipedia and participatory media) hold great promise. Bottom-up production is driven by social incentives, comes at a lower cost, realizes economies of speed and enhances quality through diverse and greater participation. Despite these benefits, Bottom-up phenomena is perceived as a significant risk because the dynamic of control is uncertain. But every risk has its rewards and can be managed if known.

Where the bottom-up and top-down meet — middlespace — is the realm of policy, metrics, incentives, cooperation and sharing control.

Looking back now I realised what got me into doing my PhD at the first place – fascination with formal/informal interplay in learning… Where the bottom-up and top-down meet. Middlespace. Taking control over your life and leadership as releasing energy of others.

I remember the feeling that got me there, instant knowing that I found something that could keep me focused for four years of PhD and probably longer… I moved beyond looking for synergies between formal and informal learning, but I’m still there, fascinated by playing with forces in a middlespace.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/10/28.html#a1403; comments are here.

• How blogging makes my life difficult
• Why PhDs should start blogging
• Trustworthiness of messy research: using research audit?

Another piece “around” now almost-finished-paper.

In the study we describe in the paper we carried out exploratory interviews (we did more :) using critical incidents technique (see Intel white paper for similar approach), asking people to recall several situations when they needed in-house knowledge and discussed why and what they were looking for, how they found it and what problems were encountered.

During the interviews we found out that in many cases when people talk about “searching for knowledge” they look for

• information about knowledge (e.g. “what do we know about topic X in our organisation?”)
• knowledge representations (e.g. reports on certain subject)
• knowledgeable people

This findings support the argument that knowledge doesn’t exist “out there” (e.g. in documents) and that people need information cues and engagement of others to (re)construct it. A similar observation is made by Cross et. al. (2001: 102) who make a distinction between being informed about what another person knows and “the willingness of the person sought out to engage in problem solving rather than dump information”.

From this perspective “searching for knowledge” is in fact searching for information and people within an organisation in order to obtain knowledge. Or, “searching for knowledge” is a process of constructing personal learning experience, selecting learning resources and engaging others as facilitators.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/26.html#a1186; comments are here.

• Reflective learning and weblogs
• Learning: community vs. individual perspective
• WBC04: day 2 morning

I’m looking for any existing research on learning effects of web browsing.

I’m interested most in incidental and implicit learning, learning about things we were not going to learn and learning that we are not aware of. For example, I may browse through A-list blogs in search of specific information, but on the way I learn who is who, who fights and befriends with whom, learn about events they are invited to, pick up a couple of memes, learn what’s hot about RSS and Atom, find out about Dave’s new design, etc.

Of course, it connects with my interests on lurking and weblog reading :)

So far I found only Incidental learning during information retrieval: A hypertext experiment, which is 15 years old. May be I just don’t know right terminology to search for :) Any recommendations are welcome…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/02/28.html#a1099; comments are here.

• Edges
• Open-Ended Manifesto on Research and Learning
• Communities, shared spaces and weblog reading

I know that I’m not going to catch up with all interesting posts from Internet-cafe, but I’m still trying :)

John Moore (and long chain of others) point to a quote from Art & fear:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group: fifty pound of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one – to get an A. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

John adds a connection with the book Changing Conversations in Organisations by Patricia Shaw.

This is such a fantastic book I can’t do it justice here, but essentially Shaw discusses

(moving from a) thought-before-action, design-before-implementation, systematic, instrumental logic of organizing, towards a paradoxical kind of logic in which we see ourselves as participatingin the self-organizing emergence of meaningful activity from within our disorderly open-ended responsiveness to one another

Shaw is talking about how we talk to each other, the story is about making pots; they’re both about recognising that it is misleading to think we can entirely separate thinking from doing – an insight that may trouble a great many management thinkers.

At the same time Martin Dugage writes about smart people driving out action linking to Why Can’t We Get Anything Done?

All those provoke many ideas for my thinking on learning vs. doing and would provide an interesting angle to look at the actionable sense story, but I guess I’m not writing on it now :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/01/05.html#a893; comments are here.

• Learning On-Line vs. e-Learning; tacit learning
• A year of passion
• Bicultural leaders, change and synchronicity

Another turn on Learning: communities vs. courses – 1, 2, 3: George Siemens summarises the discussion in Learning Ecology, Communities, and Networks. It’s a great overview (and it’s very good to have someone rethinking and summarising bits of distributed ideas), but I’m thinking on implementation challenges.

I wouldn’t come back to my concerns that some educational goals may not work with community dynamics, this time it’s about learners themselves, as “The simple fact of membership in one or seventeen networks specifies little about content of knowledge and nothing about degree of mastery” (Spike Hall). This point links the discussion about learning in a community with another stream on learning with weblogs.

Spike Hall notes that introducing weblogs as a learning tool is not about the technology, but about “passing over the deuterolearning (aka meta-learning and learning-to-learn) torch” and lack of meta-learning skills of students. He also adds that we are likely to overlook it:

I thought I might mention this because those already deep into a) weblogging / journaling, or b)research and development, as two examples, are already deep into self-directed growth and may take their own skill for granted. This taking-for-granted sets up a certain blindness to the total set of attitudes and skills that go into high levels of active and self-directed learning. And this blindness, in turn, can render the teacher/developer incapable of isolating and teaching the subskills and attitudes that are involved.

Sebastian Fiedler continues:

Though I certainly see the potential of personal Webpublishing to be turned into “a major self-uplift machine” (actually a good part of my paper for BlogTalk 2003 was trying to examine the possibility to conceptualize personal Webpublshing as a powerful tool for self-organized learning), I keep bumping into missing “subskills and attitudes” of adult learners whenever I try to integrate personal Webpublishing practices into formal course settings.

Sebastian points that it’s difficult to change existing learning habits and attitudes of adults and that there is a variety of ethical questions around it. At the end his asks:

What can we really do to promote more self-teaching and self-organized learning?

Can personal Webpublishing practices support a development into this direction?

Or do we need to treat some “attitudes and sub-skills” as explicit pre-requisites for turning personal Webpublishing into a tool for personally meaningul learning?

I would add: Can we decide being a self-organised learner is a good thing for someone who is comfortable learning in other ways? It’s quite a paradox: we want learners to be self-directed and this is one small thing we will decide for them… I believe that reflection and meta-learning skills are increasingly important in our days. My questions is: how do we facilitate others going there without forcing them?

Coming back to learning in communities: given the lack of structure and guidance in communities it’s personal meta-learning and communication skills that make learning possible. And, as Spike Hall notes, those who have these skills tend to take them for granted and expect that everyone will learn given the opportunity to do so. I don’t think so and I don’t have ready an efficient and ethical roadmap of developing these skills.

Related: earlier post on Developing reflexivity.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/10/17.html#a805; comments are here.

• eLearning’s Next Chapter
• Learning webs: introducing weblogs to support communities
• BlogWalk 2.0: personal Webpublishing for self-organized and informal learning

Follow-ups on Learning: communities vs. courses

George Siemens summarises main benefits of communities and courses and suggests that “good” elements of courses can be supported in communities. I’m not so sure.

Structure and focus of courses have something to to with teacher’s authority (courses are other-directed), while in communities there is no real authority (ok, there are respected experts, but respecting someone is not enough to discipline yourself :) I’m not sure that a combination of both will work.

Jeremy Hiebert reflects on his own learning in different forms (read it!) and describes three main reasons to join formal learning program: credentials, discipline and feedback.

I especially liked parts on feedback in courses and in blogging community. On feeback in blogs:

The blogging community talks a lot about the interaction of blogs, and we’ve all seen some great quasi-conversations emerge across several sites at once, but the type of feedback you get on your writing tends to be somewhat impersonal, even if you get to know the personalities behind the writing. Comments might point you somewhere for more info, or disagree with something you’ve written, but they rarely give you a sense of how you’re doing overall. You might know that Person B disagrees with your stance on standardized testing, and that a study exists to refute one of your points, but you probably won’t get help in improving the articulation of your arguments or research skills.

Bill Brandon summarises problems with communities:

1. Accountability: with formal instruction, someone is accountable for results; and 2. Bad information drives out good

He also adds, “Much of what is learned informally is wrong, and there is no easy way to correct it.” [related: piece on why articulation of implicit learning is important in implicit learning]

Oliver Wrede suggests that not only who is learning, but also what is to be learnt is important for making choices between communities and courses.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/10/14.html#a797; comments are here.

• Online communication tools: designed for a group, experienced by an individual
• KMSS03: Knowledge networks and communities
• Single community space: why communities are usually tied to one technology?

There is an interesting post by George Siemens and follow-up discussion on learning communities vs. courses. I guess it reflects well educator’s frustrations about courses and fascination by communities.

Why communities are not good? Communities are nightmares for novices: lack of clear roles or structures, overflow of information, discussions that you join in a middle, strange language… Communities could be good to stay updated in the field or get specific questions answered, but they are hell if you want to get solid understanding of the domain. Communities are difficult for those who are not self-directed learners yet or choose not to be self-directed in specific context (I believe in the right to choose not to be self-directed :) And finally, to learn in a community, you have to be open for unexpected opportunities to learn (see related thoughts about not learning in a community).

Why courses are good? Good course instructors take into account learners needs and level of being (choosing to be) self-directed and provide guidance that makes our path through learning exciting and efficient. Courses provide context that makes us more ‘disciplined’ then we would be by ourselves: pushing to learn things we would never consider important, doing assignments to articulate silent ideas or connect loose ends, initiating brainstormings that should lead to some tangible results and not only random thoughts. Courses provide structure to make learning about complex things easier. Finally, good courses develop our abilities to become self-directed learners.

I believe that both courses and communities (and other forms to support learning) provide good conditions for learning in some cases. The problem is that we don’t know much what are those cases and how learners and those who facilitate learning can make good choices for combining different environments for learning. Effective learners are developing their own (often unconscious) strategies to make these choices, but I haven’t seen much research on it.

I would explain lack of research in this area by two factors. First, the scale and importance of informal learning are quite recent discoveries (as far as I know from 1979 study of Allen Tough on personal learning projects). Second, the focus of most thinking about learning: educational institutions and companies think in terms of activities or environments that support learning of many. In this case even when learners’ needs and preferences are taken into account they result in events and programs optimised to help learning of many at the same time, rather than to optimise learning of one person across different contexts.

Related reading: Jay Cross: The Other 80% for an overview on informal learning.

Some of my posts: formal vs. informal learning, Supporting informal learning, Virtual communities as learning networks, Bricolage learning and longer story on synergies between formal and informal learning.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/10/12.html#a794; comments are here.

• First derivative, knowledge workers and PhD
• Research on lurking
• Survey on informal learning

Bill Seitz reacts on communities don’t practice with a suggestion to focus on teams and not communities, because their focus on outcomes “creates a shared ConText which makes learning much stronger”.

This triggered my response, which I’m reposting here.

Agree that distinguishing between team and community is important. Not sure if learning in teams is stronger:

• People in teams have a natural drive to learn – they learn in order to get things done. But after “things are done” (e.g. a project is over) the motivation to learn from past experiences is much lower, because “new things” call for “new learning”.

• Shared understanding (ConText) is stronger in teams, but it may also lead to “group think”, while a community provides more diversity (and I believe that learning comes from recognising differences).

• “Doing” focus of teams creates another problem for learning – lack of time to stop, look back and reflect (more).

Summarising I would say that teams create better conditions for “learning while doing” (implicit learning) and learning directly related to the task, but they don’t provide enough time and motivation for reflection and “learning beyond task focus” (e.g. learning more about a field to prepare for a future job).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/09/29.html#a772; comments are here.

• Facilitation lessons learnt
• Relational qualities that promote effective knowledge sharing
• Learning instructional design