DigitlDialog

Are There Learning Artifacts? part 2

Continuing from my previous post (sorry for the delay but Dave Lee and I were burning the SFO midnight oil to get an article in by deadline),  here's my second bone of contention.  The content of blogs, podcasts, IMs, etc. can be offered up to an interested and engaged public.  But, as such, it's just grist for the learning mill - it's not yet learning.  Until the person on the receiving end of these technologies actively engages in a process of assimilation/reflection/application with the latent sources of knowledge, learning is still an unrealized possibility.

I sometimes think the misconception about learning is a symptom of an information-rich world.  It's easy to assume that if you have a lot of content, you have a lot of learning.  Ninth-grade science (not the last course I took on the topic but one most folks have encountered) taught us about potential energy.  The wood pile could (when ignited) provide a roaring fire; unlit it was just a lot of lumber.  Those are two distinctly different states for the same commodity.  The relationship of information to learning is more fluid as I think about it . . . a continuum with many phase changes along the way.  At one end, the communicator sends a message . . . in between the recipient grabs it, chews it up, matches it to existing schema, dialogues about it, tries it out, makes it her own . . . voila learning - and maybe some life altering transformation!

Are There Learning Artifacts?

Been mulling over a comment by Nancy White that Beth Kanter picked up on. Nancy's ad hoc remark in Learning, Capturing and Sharing Conference Artifacts suggested that . . .

In the end, the key around these practices is that when we engage all or part of the group in the production of our "learning artifacts" -- we all learn more AND we make some of that learning available to others. The act of production is an act of meaning making.

What makes my alarm go off in reaction to these ideas is not the idea that Web2.0 tools are  creating artifacts.  I am ready to concede, given Wikipedia's notion of artifact that something crafted by human hands, which is of note in relation to the chronicle of what's happened, that we've got some "stuff".  The challenge comes from two assumptions that I'm not quite ready to buy into. 

The first supposition is that as various means are used to capture the proceedings of an event, (Nancy mentions: Chat/IRC, Videocasts, VOIPcasts, Podcasts, and Visual Facilitation), the performance of encapsulating and depicting is in itself learning.  You could argue that the person who is collecting and synthesizing has acquired some information.  Using tools and a process, the words, ideas, experience, sounds, etc.,  that are conveyed and shared within a context, are made available to a virtual audience. The more engaged the "recorder" is and the greater degree of processing needed to summarize, use metaphors, create analogies, connect to other facts (in the present moment and from the past), the richer that person's experience.  The learning is not in that moment in which these actions are taking.  That's simply because learning is a process that happens when the information shifts from short-term to long-term memory and results in changed beliefs and behaviors.

That's all for now . . . I'll get to assumption two tomorrow.

e-Collaboration on Trial

"Where I grew up, learning was a collective activity. But when I got to school and tried to share learning with other students that was called cheating. The curriculum sent the clear message to me that learning was a highly individualistic, almost secretive, endeavor. My working class experience . . . was disparaged."

 Henry A Giroux, Border Crossings, NY: Routledge, 1992

When I first heard James Surowiecki, it was on NPR around the time his book,  The Wisdom of Crowds, was published.  Something about his ideas made sense to me . . . under certain circumstances people often agreed on a fact or decision.  In the last week, there's been some buzz generated by David Freedman in his article for the latest issue of Inc., The Idiocy of Crowds.  there's a lot I can take issue with in the article, but in one rash statement, he's really pushed a hot button for me:

The effectiveness of groups, teamwork, collaboration, and consensus is largely a myth. In many cases, individuals do much better on their own. Our bias toward groups is counterproductive. And the technology of ubiquitous connectedness is making the problem worse.

Freedman seems to have decided that anything but going through life as the "lone ranger" brings out the worst in all of us.  With some classic examples of office politics, power plays and outright stupidity, he bashes the working relationships that provide the intellectual rigor, experience, insight and just plain joy of creating something together.  Just as the quote I put at the top of this post explains, kids instinctively seek each other and mess around.  Mud pies, bed sheet theaters, and plans to run away were the inventions of the first teams I belonged to.  When things toppled or lost direction, the immediate response was to go at it one more time until it worked.  That's learning at ground level . . . the real kind that takes hold and sticks.

And that jab about the seamless technology of web2.0 . . . we'll get a lot out of it as we "play" together.  The only thing, as Giroux notes, is that it will take getting over the very thing Freedman seems to want "individualistic, almost secretive, endeavor[s]".  We've taught employees how to get in a game they can't play fairly.  Sleight of hand, engineered repartee, intimidation and veiled agendas  . . . How could that make it easy to collaborate?  Take those conditions away and people can join together with honesty, trust and transparency -- face-to-face or online.