Forbidden to learn (socially)

On the train I overheard a conversation between two youngsters. One said he was an intern at a school. The internship went quite well but he was surprised that during the break time the teachers weren't paying any attention to the trainees. In the staff room the teachers were talking and exchange busily amongst themselves without inviting the trainees into their conversations.

At a meeting I got into a conversation with someone who was involved in facilitating online exchange through a knowledge platform. I enthusiastically told that they should go and meet with another organization, engaged in a similar process. She told me that she could not talk with that company at all because it is a competitor of her company .... Forbidden!

In both cases, it is as if you prohibit people to learn. In social learning, it is important that you can look into the kitchen, you chat and learn in conversation with other professionals. If you look at these two situations from a 'social learning' angle you miss significant opportunities to learn. The school's perception is most likely that trainees learn from practice, but I think they may learn a lot more by listening in from the way other teachers talk about their classes and students. In the case where employees are not allowed to talk to the competitor, they are afraid companyideas (secret?) flowing to the competition, but in this case you can just learn together how you shape knowledge and you may both go faster.

I was very surprised these kind of situations still exists. Do you know of more situations in which it is actually forbidden to learn?

How is internet changing the way you think? book review

Edge is asking an annual question. In 2010 the question was: how is internet changing the way your think? This question was presented to 151 people and they answered this question in 2-3 pages. Amazing to see how different the 151 answers are! It was a great read during the holidays, very inspiring and there were many things I recognised..

Some people state that the Internet is not really changing their way of thinking, but most of the writers respond it does. Many mention that they consulted pages on the internet while writing the piece, and so reached different conclusions than in a world without internet. Paul Bloom: "I realize how nice people can be through the Internet". Strangers devote their time to respond and share their ideas and knowledge. Haim Harari is a physicist and sees three major changes:

• Messages are getting shorter, the attention is more and more on one-liners (potentially misleading!)
• Facts are available on the Internet, so hence we need to think less about facts. Thinking comes more down to making connections, collecting new ideas, distinguishing head and side issues, analysis, etc. As the facts are now available on the Internet, we do pay less attention to remembering the fact. (though with the warning that it is important and hard to distinguish between pseudo- and real facts and facts on the internet)
  
• The process of learning and teaching is changing in-depth by all the possibilities and dangers of the Internet. Lessons of the greatest teachers in the world are available, we need to know fewer facts by heart as they can always to be found on the internet. This leads to a different pattern of knowledge, understanding and developing thinking in people. This fact has, according to him, not yet sufficiently penetrated and transformed the world of education. And I think it has not yet led to profound changes in the training / education world (but seems to come).
  

Personally my way of learning and thinking has changed dramatically by the Internet and especially social media. I follow many other professionals, what they are thinking, doing, sharing, reading. I become more creative, think of new possibilities. I am also a collector of information. The danger is that you do not have enough time reviewing the information to place and also had something to do, something that many authors mention in the book. Judith Rich Harris compares the Internet even with a bottle of ketchup. First too little came out, and now too big a glob. I have to watch myself that I'm not taking in and bookmarking too much information not using it to apply ideas and incorporate it in my own practices. I see my use of social media as supportive to developing my professional practice. Yet it happens that people retweet what they found through me and that I already forgot! I see this as the real danger. A beautiful expression of Brian Knutson (from this book) is 'survival of the focused'. He observes that some are steaming ahead as internetsailers, while others navigate around helplessly.

Making good use of the positive aspects of the new possibilities of learning through the internet while watching the pitfalls is necessary. For me, that means improving my focus on quality and application of new ideas, make sure it is not a mash of information, but that it affects and improves your own professional practice. So I try to read less, but apply more.

Learning by coincidence on Twitter

(cartoon via Rob Speekenbrink)
I get involved in lots of discussions whether Twitter- is learning (or nonsense). People are sceptical on what you can learn through 140 characters. Often I answer that you definitely learn through twittering because you can link through to blogposts, articles etc. Basically defending the 140 characters.

Probably the main difference is in the theory about learning that people hold. Is learning what you do in school or in a training or is it something we do continuously? From a social learning point of view, Twitter is an important medium in which people converse, and build relationships. For people who are not active on Twitter this may be quite invisible. If you look at an individual twitter message, it makes no sense. But if you follow people over a longer period of time, you notice the influence it has, on the way you think and act. Like the day I decided to put up the christman tree because many people were twittering about it :).

Last week a conversation made me think about a different angle. (Nb: following is a rather longish story, if it is boring to you you may skip the rest of this paragraph). We have been very busy searching for a good secondary school for our daughter and it took up quite a bit of our time. We visited open days, evenings for parents, classes. There are many things to consider in your decision-making. In the Hague there are also too many pupils per school, so you have a chance to be rejected. In our case, many friends started to apply for a school, and we were about to apply too. Then I talked to a friend in another part of the country and found out there most people wait for the test results (CITO), so that you know the exact school type. This suddenly made a lot of sense to me. So you see how you get influenced by your environment and may overlook the obvious. So we decided to wait for the test results first.

Back to Twitter. I see a twitter network having the same function. Seeing new perspectives, widening your choices. Seeing new solutions to problems you didn't even know you had. Simply by reading a lot of stories. Ofcourse you need to be able to link it back to your own situation, and that depends on the quality of your network. Another example: through my twitter network I learned about prezi as an alternatve for Powerpoint, even though I wasn't looking for it. You may call it serendipity too.

Do you want to do more with twitter? Here's a great handbook: free download!

Do collective lessons learned exist?

I'm currently working in a team where we consult eachother and divide work. The team works quite well in my opinion. What we don't do is make short minutes or action notes and so it happens that we rediscuss what was already decided earlier on (everyone forgot). Or someone doesn't do what was agreed (forgot). It's interesting: isn't ending a meeting with action points and write them down and follow them up a lesson we all know? So why don't we do it in this case?

I've also worked in Kenya together with CARE-International on a credit program for female enterpreneurs in a rice area. This was in 1989 or 1990, south of Kisumu. An important principle was that NGOs (non-governmental organisations) are not good in managing credit programs because not thinking in business models and NGO workers are seen by farmers as 'friends' and 'supporters'. A different role than credit officer. So the program was sub-contracted to a credit institute. In 2007 (17 years later!) I visited an NGO in Ghana. They had learnt a lesson from their credit program: that they are not good in recollecting the loans because they are seen by the farmers as an NGO. So they thought of sub-contracting to a credit institute. But the damage was already done.

These kind of observations (I could make a much longer list!) get me thinking about collective learning processes and how difficult they are. The first example shows that there is more to the practice of working together than 'knowing' how it should be done. Probably the group is forming and trying to find a way of working together effectively with as little energy input as necessary?

The second example I think shows how difficult it is to learn collectively within a sector. And maybe that reading about something is not enough- you have to make your own mistakes first. It's like everybody is entitled to his/her own learning process. And if you've read this blog for longer you know I believe in the power of communities and networks to support collective learning. But what is then a collective lesson learned?

I really like the work of Nancy Dixon around these issues. She wrote a blogpost about the value of lessons learned not too long ago. She defines lessons learned at the individual level: "something I learned through an experience I’ve had that will cause me to act differently in the future" She explains the power of reflection in, for instance, after action review processes to stimulate learning and ends with the phrase: "The greatest value of lessons learned is for those who took the action". So should we simply lower our ambitions and talk about collective lessons learned? How easily we say, let's collect the lessons learned with the idea that it will contribute to collective learning. But for a collective learning process much more may be needed like sustained exchange of practices over a longer period of time.