Dave Pollard's papers on business innovation & knowledge management

	September 19, 2008

CCK08 Week Two: Expectations of a Course on Learning, and Thoughts About How We Learn THE NEW ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (& ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING) IMPROVING PERSONAL PRODUCTIVITY •Facilitating PCM: helping people to self-find, self-filter, self-publish, self-subscribe, and self-organize ‘stuff’ •Teaching research skills: methods, not tools IMPROVING CONNECTION •Facilitating conversations: with new simple, real-time connectivity tools (IM, screen-sharing, desktop video, Open Space) •Facilitating JIT canvassing: helping people discover who knows what and connecting them IMPROVING CONTEXT •Story teaching/recording: show don't tell; let learners look over the master's shoulders •Environmental scanning: discovering and communicating what’s new, what’s risky and what’s important •Sense-making: assessing and communicating what it means, what people think about it, what’s being done, what should be done, who should be talking with whom, what is important to learn (see chart above) Week 2 of the CCK08 Connectivism and Connnected Learning course was mostly about "types of knowledge", not of great interest to me, especially since my current KM riff is about the need to switch attention (and resources) From Content to Context and from Collection to Connection. So here I am among 2000 participants from around the world, all focused on knowledge and learning and how we can improve them. There is a lot of content being shared, but there is a clear struggle to make meaning of it, to put it into context that is useful. To do that, what is needed is conversation and connection. The conversations I have witnessed so far are mostly those among somewhat bewildered students of the course trying to figure out what to do. It's the classic teacher-student co-dependence played out on a massive and virtual stage: Teachers need students to make a living. Students expect teachers to tell them something that they can credentialize, get 'credit' for that will improve their resume. They want 'tests' that will allegedly demonstrate who has learned the most. Of course, tests don't demonstrate anything of the sort. They demonstrate, mostly, which student was cleverest and most knowledgeable about the subject matter before the course began. Most of the people in this massive open online course (MOOC) are not taking the course for credit (though I suspect many will claim it as personal PD). Most will not do the written assignments. Many, I suspect, will either drop out over the course of the twelve weeks when they cease to get anything more substantive out of it, or will peer back in every week or two and invest enough time to satisfy themselves they aren't missing anything important. I may well be one of them. But in the meantime I'm investing four hours a week in thinking and conversing about learning and knowledge transfer, because I think the subject is important. The two slides above (from my presentation next week at KMWorld & Intranets in San Jose) show where I'm coming from on this. Knowledge Management was coopted, early on, by a combination of librarians and researchers (who thought it was all about knowledge content), corporate trainers (who thought it was all about learning content), and Intranet/Internet corporate webmasters (who thought it was all about web and groupware content). It took a decade before disgruntled users made it clear that they still learn and share knowledge the same way they always did: by picking up the phone or walking down the hall or getting on a plane and having context-rich real-time conversations. It was, and is, all about context and connectivity. So as my slide above shows, the seven most important initiatives of KM 2.0 are context-building, connection-building, and personal productivity initiatives -- facilitating better, more informed conversations with the right people. So far this course has not focused on that. But some of the later sessions are focused on the changing role of educators, which ties in to the seven initiatives above. Regular readers know I'm a fan of unschooling -- of self-directed and self-organized learning, that is facilitated (coached), not taught. We learn through conversation, and through direct observation, with people who know more or different, from whence we pick up knowledge, ideas, insights, and new capacities. As much as I hate most of the content-focused KM 1.0 technologies, I love some of the context-focused, real-time KM 2.0 technologies (IM, screen-sharing, video capture/conferencing, Open Space) which can enable such facilitation, and enhance learning. If the Connectivism course can show other ways to make this happen, I can hardly wait. Now if only I could find some more robust ways to connect with the other participants, peer-to-peer! Category: Knowledge Management 8:50:51 PM  trackback []  comment []

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