I’m a huge fan of John Seely Brown’s work, and I read The Power of Pull last year and his newest collaboration, A New Culture of Learning, in the last week or so. The vision that the authors create in these works is truly inspirational – a world where passion drives individual learning and connectivity makes collaboration with like-minded others just a few clicks away.
As a learner, the new culture of learning encourages me to think more broadly about how I learn and what I might do to accelerate and enrich my own approaches to learning. As a learning leader, I want to be able to promote and support the new culture of learning by providing as many tools as possible and helping learners to see the myriad of ways they can learn and grow through their own efforts and through collaboration with their peers.
But I also quietly doubt that the “old” culture of learning has outlived its usefulness and that connectivity and collaboration will be the primary way we learn everything that we need to learn.
The argument put forward in The Power of Pull and A New Culture of Learning is that the world is changing too quickly for us to even attempt to reify and “transfer” learning to newcomers. But I think there are content areas and skills that can be learned in structured ways to brings newcomers on board even in the most complex and fast-changing professions. When I enter a space that requires new knowledge and skill, I’m careful not to annoy the people who live in that space with my newcomer questions – I seek more formal means to come up to speed before jumping in. I appreciate when others do the same in those spaces where I am an expert, and I’m happy to create formal entre points (dare I say training and eduction?) or recommend resources to assist them as well. Once we come up to speed on some baseline, participation and collaboration is absolutely the way we develop into experts, but I think structured learning and participation are still often the best way to start out. Does that ring true for anyone else?
Seely Brown and his co-authors also celebrate the idea that memorization of facts is no longer necessary in general education if we can instead provide students with the tools to access and explore information on the internet. But I think that our ability to make connections, to cross boundaries, to innovate depends on holding ideas in our heads – and some of that information comes from more traditional, structured learning. I have found my broad liberal arts education provides me with metaphors and concepts that I use all the time, and I’m betting I wouldn’t have those ideas in my head without the requirements of a formal education.
In addition, it has been my experience that many people struggle with accessing and using new tools for learning, despite their relative expertise in operating a computer and surfing the net. Identifying like-minded peers with whom to collaborate doesn’t necessarily come naturally. Resources aren’t marked with a seal of approval and determining credibility and accuracy takes a little bit of digging and a lot of good judgement. Because so many professionals and leading edge thinkers have been able to tap into the collective, they can make it sound easy – but it isn’t always, and everyone isn’t comfortable jumping in with both feet. In addition to getting everyone access to people and to information, we probably need to help people learn how to learn – and that is as true of grade-schoolers as it is of out-of-school people who are just now learning to take advantage of the net.
This is important because we still need to develop and apply expertise in the “old” culture of learning. We still need creative and skilled instructional designers and developers, engaging and talented learning facilitators, and great coaches and mentors. We need writers, graphic artists, and videographers who know how to support learning.
Those of us who work in the learning and development field shouldn’t be looking for new careers; we should be redoubling our efforts to learn how to ensure effectiveness and efficiency in creating formal training and education (especially in schools at all levels). And we should be learning as much as possible about how to take advantage of this new culture of learning – for ourselves, and for the learners we support.
I’m thinking that the new culture of learning doesn’t replace the old, it enriches it.
For more on the new culture of learning, I highly recommend:
The Power of Pull, by John Hugel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison (2010)
A New Culture of Learning, by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown (2011)
hi – just read your blog. Must admit I think Doug and I must not have been all that clear. In a world of constant change the half life of a skill is apt to be dramatically shortened hence we need to find ways to update our skills on a continuous basis. Hopefully this does not require always going back to schools or training sessions but rather can leverage the collective for learning new material. Why i was surprised by your blog is that in a world of constant (even accelerating) change, brilliantly designed instructional material is now more important than ever! Mental models matter as well as dispositions. Material that uses visualizations, graphics and simulations models are needed now more than ever. Just in the last three years i have counted on such to help me understand two new computing paradigms – MapReduce from Google and GPUs from Nvida. Great youtube lectures plus well designed instructional material was critical in both cases. In fact the ultimate irony to me was just two nights ago i went over the final cut of a new instructional video i helped make costing several hundred thousand dollars. We need all the best techniques of the past plus many new ones to cope with the radical expansion of new ideas/methods/models/theories that seem to be confronting us daily. Bounded learning environments (of many kinds) that help us tap the collective, cultivate our imaginations and nurture questing disposition are now more important than ever.
I’m so glad you commented. Perhaps I projected ideas onto your work that I actually gleaned elsewhere that have seemed to imply that formal learning isn’t needed – that the community of people interested in a topic/field will find each other and work together to learn and co-create new approaches.
In your chapter on A Tale of Two Cultures, I got the impression that the idea of transferring knowledge is somehow outdated. I tend to think in constructivist terms, so “transferring knowledge” isn’t exactly how I’d describe it, but I do think that creating structured circumstances in which people can learn is helpful. I’ve been seeing predictions of the demise of training and development departments, based on the assessment that T&D can’t respond fast enough and the conviction that interested people will find each other and learn through peer-to-peer connections.
I wholeheartedly agree that there is a lot to learn through peer sharing (and that we need to work together to co-create the future), but I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that good learning design brings people up to speed more quickly, and that there is indeed a science to good learning design. I’m sure I’ll be frequently quoting your statement that “brilliantly designed instructional material is now more important than ever!” That’s exactly the point I was trying to make.
While I spent more time in the post talking about what I disagreed with, I will reiterate what I said at the top of the post – I have always found your work to be inspirational and leading edge, and I gain a lot of useful insight for my role as a learning leader and advocate for professional development in the learning and development field. Thanks again for taking the time to comment.
i think the catch is that the transfer model can’t keep up with the outpouring of new knowledge and the constantly changing world. Yes it still has a role but no matter what – great instructional design may have an ever greater role to play in the ‘petri dish’ new kind of learning culture where information & experimentation fuse. Personally speaking – i grave it!! jsb
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Like the book for enterprise business, Doing Both,, learning means happens best with bounded ecosystems that include the opportunity to actively choose, try on and alter ideas in a world where critical thinking and collaborative creation increasingly co-exist – just as tacit learning in growing increasingly important – as their book points out – yet valuable collaborators have gained mastery of certain subjects as well as awareness that, to stay relevant, they must engage with people quite different that them around sweet spots of mutual benefit…..
Besides some of the most meaningful adventures andmemories often come from accomplish something greater with others than one can alone
so true… diversity matters in what makes collectives powerful and of course weak ties matter but for often for different reasons…
Catherine, I read your post today, just after having written a rambly one of my own in which I was musing about training versus learning. As I read your ideas, I noted down the phrase “formal entry points.” It struck me as significant for a couple of reasons.
Even for the mainly-procedural, mainly-newcomer skills that I think traditional formal training addresses, there’s not One Point to Rule Them All. One client, as an add-on for training in a custom application, wanted frontline sales people to “learn spreadsheets.” We were able to identify a very high-priority goal (“enter, edit, and save data on company-created spreadsheet templates”), and a secondary goal the client hadn’t thought of (“point out ways for people who want more spreadsheet skills to get them”).
Moreover, the plural in “entry points” underscores the real-world application of skills, where different workers (and groups of workers) achieve different results with the same system or tools, because they’re at different parts of an overall process. The online customer service agent helping me with a problem, and the technician addressing installation difficulties onsite, may work with the same or overlapping information, but what they do how they do it is quite different.
A further point, and one I think you and John Seely Brown would agree on, came to mine with your comment about determining credibility and accuracy. I’d maybe add developing credibility, and fluency as well. These are not things well suited to traditional training methods, though in the best circumstances the work environment tends to support them.
Catherine,
Happy to have run across your blog and have the opportunity to keep learning from you 1 year after finishing your CHC class in Instructional Design (tall guy, big on classical music). I really enjoy your thoughtful writing style and hope you plan to blog more again shortly.
Dave
Thank you so much for the kind words!
[...] causes us to seek out certain kinds of learning and to reject others. Recent writings regarding a “new culture of learning” point out that people who are passionate about their work find learning opportunities abounding in [...]