Sunday Posts

It is perhaps quite obvious that Universities are communities at the core, but perhaps not. While we may pay leap service to the idea of a community, from the language we employ, we mean them to be factories. Nothing against factories, and they are indeed communities too, it must be said. However, that is not how we see a factory, do we? In fact, that factories are communities of people have been lost from our imagination. Rather, we have developed a top-down, process view of what happens in factories - raw material comes in and finished products go out - and regarded the human community around this a distraction, a cost, something to be dispensed into once machines have got smart enough. We adopt a process view of the universities - applicants come in and graduates go out - and regarded them exactly as factories. Our focus has shifted what happens afterwards, to the finished good and its demands, and not so much what happens inbetween. That knowledge could be created through...

I have been reading Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner's timely book, The New Social Learning , which points to the social nature of organizational learning. I would rate this book only 3 out of 5, and found parts of it quite laborious to read. Lots of it reads like PowerPoint slides put together, which makes it quite dry and difficult to engage with: However, the book nonetheless makes important points that any Learning and Development practitioner should take notice of. The central thesis of the book is to conjoin the psychological and sociological approaches of learning theories together. Starting from the point of organizational learning, indeed Tony Bingham heads ASTD , or the American Society for Training and Development, which is one of the most respected professional associations for training and development practitioners in the world. Their approach, however, centers around facilitating a 'learning organization', through 'paving online community roads' and ...

The trigger for this post comes from a recent conversation at the Nottingham Trent University School of Narrative Arts, where students in the Undergraduate programmes on Multimedia Programme use a blog to maintain a learning journal and many find this useful to construct a narrative identity (and look up narrative identities of their colleagues and seniors) and build their learning endeavours around it. I found such use blogging as a learning tool innovative, though it indeed seemed obvious after I learnt about it. Consider the programme structure and one gets to understand how it helps further. The programme in question leads to a B Sc(Hons) in Multimedia Programming. It starts with a generalist first year, but a specialism starts to develop in Year 2. The students have a choice to pick up one from three available streams - Moving Images, Interactive Media or Animation - and work on it for next couple of years. While it sounds straightforward, the biggest challenge for the students is...

The more I think about it, I become more convinced that universities have already started morphing into the User Network model, adopting the role of a guide and mentor to the seekers of knowledge, rather than trying to be the fountainhead of knowledge creation. One may as well argue some of the best research and innovation come out of universities. This is indeed true, and in that function, universities create knowledge. And, I see the universities concentrating more on research function, while morphing their teaching function into a technology-facilitated user network form. This does not happen today as the universities are expected to meet their social obligations through the performance of the teaching function. The economics of an university is dependent on dispensing education, and research is mostly an area where universities incur costs. The government policy expects the universities to produce a certain number of graduates, in line with the needs of the employers as well as the...

I am preparing to write the Open College idea down over the Christmas holidays and hence, doing some reading and review of ideas. There could not have been a better place to start the journey than Clayton Christensen's DISRUPTING CLASS [with Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson], where the effect of disruptive innovation on how education is delivered has been examined. The book is full of concepts about disruptive innovation and how they are brought to market, and a connecting fable which lets us understand the possibilities and challenges of technology introduction to the market. There are some rather disconnected, but useful stand-alone sections, on Pre -school education and Educational Research for example, but overall the book is a good read and stimulating for anyone interested in the business of education. The point of this post, of course, is not the book, but an idea contained therein, which requires closer examination in the context of the open college project. This is the ...

Social Learning is the current rage. That's the keyword the Learning Technology providers are clinging on to, the knight in the shining armour who would rescue the stricken companies in the middle of this unending downturn. Learning is invariably social, and even those theorists who would primarily look at the learner as the key driver for all learning activities, can not rule out the role the social context plays. Or, the shared context, as in a classroom, where lot of actual learning happens through interactions between learners or by absorbing another person's point of view of the same learning input. The technology-mediated learning is devoid of this, mostly, because, for all its advantages, e-Learning is mostly a solitary activity. This leaves it with a crippling limitation. While the e-learning content can be quite engaging, without the social context, learning loses fun, inspiration and ability to inspire thoughts. This may be okay to impart instructions, areas where act...

After I wrote the rather 'autobiographical' note on how I got frustrated in my efforts to establish an open learning-orientated environment in a training organization, which, I reasoned, would have triggered culture change and resulted in greater commitment and team work, I was reminded by some of the readers that I have not explained fully why I think command-and-control learning is such a bad thing. Yet others reminded me that corporate learning can not happen in a cafeteria format, and companies do not pay for learning to educate people but to get the job done. So, they reasoned, the companies must focus the learning efforts of an individual on what they need, rather than on the whims and fancies of the individual employees. In summary, they suggested the opposite conclusion from my own: the pendulum actually is swinging away from my own, learner-directed learning end. I think I made one mistake in my previous post. I stated that I do not like command-and-control systems a...

I had an interesting experience last week which is worth writing about. I was asked to recommend ways to improve the operations of an organization. This was outside my work, and I knew little about the business and its operations before I was asked to sit in a few meetings, observe and give recommendations. The request was made by someone who I could not say no to, despite the fact that I have enough on my plate now. I ended up having a very interesting, insightful experience, which was my main takeaway from the exchange. The organization in question is a government contractor, and delivers training services in various occupational areas. The organization has grown over many years, and some of those growth was ad hoc . The systems and processes that I noticed seemed to have grown organically, from its roots as a small firm, and somehow did not scale up when the organization got larger. Besides, following a merger a few years back, this firm has suddenly become very large, have achieved...

I had an interesting conversation on the scope of e-Learning and how much it will replace the traditional classroom training in the next five years. Obviously, there were many sceptics in the group, and they were pushing the opinion that e-Learning is not nearly as good or effective as someone standing up to teach. However, it was heartening to note that most people saw the argument for what it is - a passionate plea for horse-drawn cars when automobile has started coming to the market - and the fact that usually it is comparing some basic e-learning efforts with some very good teachers. The general opinion, therefore, was that e-learning will continue to expand in scope and possibly replace most of what is done in classrooms today. The panel touched upon various media comparison studies, which proved, over a number of years [starting 1947, when such a study was first carried out, a comparison between video, paper-based and classroom training] that the learning outcomes do not vary sig...