I am scanning Twitter and ran across an item with a link to a post that purports to explain what “blended learning” is and why it is important.
Arrrgh. I hate that term.
And I’d argue it’s done more harm than good in the quest to get learning & development professionals to think more creatively and broadly about learning.
ALL learning is blended. It’s social, it requires applied practice and tapping into all sorts of forms of content. Why can’t we just stop this silly labeling nonsense and just declare that the entire organizational workplace is our learning environment – and that includes all the ‘blend’ of rich activities, connections and technologies that make up the workplace?
Several of my MSLOC colleagues were/are deeply involved in the startup of the program at Northwestern University and its subsequent expansion. Jeanne Olson writes eloquently about that growth in Design for America: Co-Creating with Tomorrow’s Designers (an article also published this week) in Core77. Sami Nerenberg, a designer and currently graduate student at MSLOC, is currently Director of Operations at DFA and has a huge hand in spreading the program to other universities (Cornell’s DFA activities were profiled by Fast Company). Other colleagues have been coaches and advisors, or in the case of alumni Katy Mess, were there in the very beginning making the vision real.
Olson’s Core77 piece offers a great look at the back story of how the program co-creates the learning environment with its students. And the result is not only real know-how about design – but incredible impact on the communities in which the DFA students operate. Anyone who is drawn to the idea that education should start and end with actual practice (doing the work of real practitioners) should study the design and growth of DFA. When students get this excited about their education, we need to pay attention.
This MOOC is impressive. Some 35 weeks of content and thought-leadership, designed (in part) to create a snapshot of the state-of-the-art of technology and learning as it stands in 2011/2012. Fair warning from the designers of this event – Dave Cormier, George Siemens and Stephen Downes – that there is simply more content than any one reasonable human being can digest. And in the orientation to the course there are several thoughtful videos from the three exploring this issue (Cormier’s below).
At this moment, what is most intriguing to me is exactly what will drive my path through the content. As an instructor in a graduate program that provides opportunity for innovation in course design, I’ve had the opportunity to explore “stewarding” students through ideas and concepts and encouraging personal discovery of how these ideas and concepts apply to their professional context. But there is definitely a level of steering still going on.
In the MOOC it is all about choosing your own path. I suspect that I’ll jump onto some topics because of some deep-seated geek-attraction instinct (squirrel!! squirrel!!). But I also know that I’ll be influenced by sharing with my friends at MSLOC (we have already connected on a Google+ circle).
Not sure how my path will be determined. It’ll be emergent for sure. But I’ll be paying attention to how this plays out because I sense it will lead to some interesting insights.
I’m in the midst of a public sense-making expedition that I hope (fingers crossed on both hands) will lead to finding more people who believe that higher education and business enterprises as more alike than different when it comes to learning and knowledge sharing and technology.
Let me just share a few stops from my expedition:
Earlier this week I wrote a short thought-piece in Google+ commenting on Luis Suarez’s blog post: Google Plus and the enterprise – what’s the deal?. Luis’ post captured a number of themes that I’ve been sharing and thinking about as we experiment with social platforms within high education.
I also ran into Cathy N. Davidson’s excellent case story of her experimenting with standard social collaboration tools (Wikipedia, blogs, etc). in an undergraduate course she created called “This is your brain on the internet.” Davidson is a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Duke, author and clearly an educational innovator. Harold Jarche riffs off of Davidson’s piece in his blog. Both Jarche and Davidson pull on common themes related to learning in networks — and how socially unsettling this can be in top-down environments like educational institutions and businesses. Both also advocate for pushing into new ways of thinking about learners and learning.
Great post from KM blogger V Mary Abraham reminding us about the power of sharing know-how across practitioner boundaries when addressing difficult challenges.
Academy Brief: Knowledge Forum http://t.co/Ws20ENG via @NASA > Among interesting bits: Ability, attitude, assignments, alliances.— Jeff Merrell (@JeffMerrell) May 26, 2011
More on common sense/new thinking re: training evaluation from Harold Jarche. @hjarche blog post http://ur1.ca/38cr1 and comments on post-Kirkpatrick thinking.
