e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

Learning Styles Index: No one right answer?

So I'm sitting here look at this nicely done list of instructional design models; and I'm thinking this is why I am so wary of people or models promoting the "7" this or "9" that...I saw this panel at ISPI several years ago. It was supposed to be one of those "Myths, Fads, and Fallacies" of learning that are so much fun (so much fun in fact, we did a session of #lrnchat on it). 

One of the "gurus" on stage was Thiagi. Brilliant and humorous as ever; Thiagi looked up and down the table and said, in that accent, "It's clear to me that I am the only Indian at a table full of chiefs." The crowd cracked up, but then Thiagi proceeded to tell the audience that the idea of "systems" thinking about something as inherently messy as learning was (and I'm paraphrasing) a bit arrogant. He did this with great style and humor and the whole room was chuckling the whole time. 

The whole time though, I was looking around thinking "do you people hear what he is saying?" I think some of them didn't but some of them probably did and were laughing nervously. So when I look at this list and I think of Thiagi's talk, I'm reminded that what we may want to pursue is something more like a school of thought - with rooms for many models and many ways of thinking - but with an emphasis on the discipline, critical thinking skills, willingness to challenge accepted wisdom and intellectual curiosity and rigor that would serve all of us well. 

To understand "e-books", maybe we need to think more about "books" and not "e"

 So I saw an exchange on Twitter between @hybridkris and mrch0mp3rs  concerning closed versus open formats for eBooks. They're a couple of smart guys and the discussion is important but it also got me thinking about the fact that maybe we to think a bit more about the "book" and its place in culture and history are and what the very real pros and cons of adding an "e" to that venerable medium may be. 

My interest in this dates back to at least 1999. I had recently left grad school and so things like the future of the academic monograph, libraries and academic journals were actually on my mind. Also on my mind was the struggle with what has to be left out when writing a book or paper and how what's left out so often forms a powerful context for not just the subject matter but for understanding the place and time that the author was occupying when they wrote the piece - critical information for being able to understand what their underlying viewpoint was. 

Robert Darnton (1,2)was always one of my favorite historians, so I read with interest his 1999 piece in the NY Times Review of Books, "The New Age of the Book." In that essay, Darnton makes a case for what I think is still one of the most compelling uses for e-books; academic publishing. He reports on the impact on library budgets of the ridiculous costs of academic journals and periodicals something that has corollary and deleterious on the amount of money that is available to spend on academic monographs - which, as anyone who has ever pursued tenure can tell you, are the lifeblood of that pursuit. 

Darnton also lays out how an e-book could be architected to provide the reader with a variety of layers of writing and knowledge that could be drilled down into at will. He sets the stage almost poetically:

"In the case of history, a discipline where the crisis in scholarly publishing is particularly acute, the attraction of an e-book should be especially appealing. Any historian who has done long stints of research knows the frustration over his or her inability to communicate the fathomlessness of the archives and the bottomlessness of the past. If only my reader could have a look inside this box, you say to yourself, at all the letters in it, not just the lines from the letter I am quoting. If only Icould follow that trail in my text just as I pursued it through the dossiers, when I felt free to take detours leading away from my main subject. If only Icould show how themes crisscross outside my narrative and extend far beyond the boundaries of my book. Not that books should be exempt from the imperative of trimming a narrative down to a graceful shape. But instead of using an argument to close a case, they could open up new ways of making sense of the evidence, new possibilities of making available the raw material embedded in the story, a new consciousness of the complexities involved in construing the past." (1) 

Darnton has now essentially created a new academic sub-discipline; the history of the book. Acting now as the Director of Harvard's libraries (srsly, how cool is that?), Darnton has published The Case for Books; a defense of the form that has endured for so long. In an article from Publisher's Weekly, it's clear that Darnton still holds to this idea of creating a multi-layer book - I still think this is a really compelling idea and one that needs more discussion (I also think its ironic that his book is available on the Kindle). 

Darnton now though has extended his interest to Google and its massive efforts to digitize millions of books. Two articles (1,2) layout both his concerns and the potential promises of such efforts. In a similar vein, he has also written on the future of the library in the digital age.  As an aside, a fav paper of mine by William Powers, Hamlet's Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal, goes into even greater detail about not just the book but the physicality of the material itself. 

So what's my point in all this? Just that we leaped into "E-learning" without fully understanding or even trying to understand in many cases, what would, could or should be different about that experience than just "learning". Now we stand here, 10+ years down the road and we the "next" button and we have rapid templates and we have online, web-based smiley sheets for assessments that tell us as little about the learning experience as do their paper-based brethren. In short, we haven't come very far. 

Now, we are doing the same with e-books (and I fear, with virtual worlds but that's a different post). The book as both physical artifact and medium of knowledge has a rich and long history - that history and the affordances granted to us by its current incarnation should not be disregarded as we go forward with e-books but studied even more closely so that we can make informed decisions not just about format and construction but also about notions of authorship, the dynamics of note-taking (I LOVE his observation concerning the linkage of reading and writing), of sharing, of who should be legally able to digitize and distribute electronic books. All of these dynamics will shape the future of the book and it's "e" cousin. We need to be literate in all of them. Let's do some reading.   

Subject-matter Networks: The Origin Story

So, last month, I was at the eLearning Guild's DevLearn conference in San Jose. Awesome conference. Really. There were zombies, they always make for a nice conference (congrats to Tandem Learning and Hybrid for pulling off a remarkable ARG). I did a lot of talking during this conference. A lot. Those of you that know me will not be surprised by this but even for me, almost three days of non-stop talking about social media and how it can impact learning is a lot. 

One of the cool things that happened when I was doing all this yammering was that it helped me solidify a few things in my head about this very topic. One of these lucid moments came during a talk about how social media can be used to loop in subject-matter experts more easily into the design process or really into whatever stage they're needed in. People had been voicing the same complaints about access to SMEs, about SME's time being booked in other ways, about the bottleneck that these problems represented and then it just hit me...(I say just after reading 1,2,3 and so on)

...we needed to be thinking differently...if we just used social media to build more ways to get to SMEs, then we wouldn't fix what was broken...our ability to access the expertise that we need, when we need it  - either in order to answer a question, provide input into a course design or for some other purpose - we didn't need better access to Subject-Matter Experts...we needed access to Subject-Matter Networks. (SMNs) 

Geez. This is what we've been talking about from Wikinomics to Small Pieces Loosely Joined...etc....but I am 99.9% confident that I coined the term! I hadn't done that before. Kinda cool. Just kinda popped out. Koreen Olbrish wrote an outstanding review of DevLearn and included the term in there - I just googled it and Clarence Fisher had a nice little blog post about it... I actually kinda included it in a blog post I did on another little blog experiment I was trying but was to get some more thoughts down on it...it even made it into the #lrnchat transcript. 

So I think though, that one thing that I really like about the term is that it works for me as a way to discuss the value of implementing social media within the enterprise, especially from the learning standpoint. This is what we want isn't it? Networks of experts that can not only give you the answer but do so from multiple perspectives drawing on multiple backgrounds and diverse knowledge sets all at a speed and scale that we've previously been incapable of. 

But the term is also a challenge...how do we de-construct our current notions of how expertise is recognized and re-configure it to allow for trust, reputation and authenticity not on an individual level but at a network level? How to construct learning experiences to maximize the existence of SMN's?

So great - a new term - thanks Mark - because if its one thing the learning and training field needed, it was a new term. Yeah, I know but hopefully this one will spur discussion and thought about how we can use social media and social networks to construct a new cognitive infrastructure. 

#lrnchat - December 10, 2009