Choosing sources

One issue I probably need to make explicit is where I have been looking for information as I researched this piece.

Primarily, I've looked at what I can find on the internet, free of charge. That's partly pragmatic - it's easier and therefor more cost-effective than a cumbersome interloaning process for hard copies of proprietary information. It's also, I think, a reflection of the changing face of intellectual property and information exchange - the hacker ethic apparently influences my online behaviour quite strongly... Part of my adaptation to working online (and I do mean "online" not simply "on my computer") is that I look for online sources and sources I can read and annotate (and c&p) on screen in preference to hard copy that I have to retype if I want to cite it. And online I expect things to be more collaborative, less commercial - yes, yes, naive I know, but that's where the hacker ethic comes in.

Another angle is that now I'm used to working online I'm developing a positive distrust of hard copy presentations - I expect them to be clumsy and out-of-date. The lead-time for printed publications seems positively glacial, how on earth can it be current? (Notwithstanding the irony of the 1996 study I mentioned in the last post being the most recent I've found online to date... Yes, I had noticed it!)

I suspect I will have to compromise and access the olde-worlde world of pay-to-see-it academic journals (I'm wizening at the thought) and I'll probably be glad I did, but in the mean time there's a lot of good, and current, stuff I can get my paws on without having to.

Marcia Conner - Ageless Learner

So, having decided to get back to the blog the question is what to start with...

One of the most useful starting points I found was Informal Learning by Marcia L. Conner. The copyright date is given as 1997-2005, (last updated May 18, 2005) from which I gather that it is a living document, ie still being added to and amended.

Conner identifies 2 axes of workplace learning, formal - informal and intentional - accidental which she summarises in the following diagram:

According to Conner, " The distinctions between formal, informal, and non-formal were first developed in the 1950s by people working in the area of international
development. In my experience and from the work we have done with organizations,
there are far more opportunities for informal accidental learning than any other
single type of learning. "

I'm not sure how useful the informal / non-formal distinction is, but I do like the diagram - particularly the clarity of associating activities with each quadrant. Of course, there will be overlaps but that doesn't detract from the value of the model as a hook to hang your thinking on.

Conner cites a US Dept of Labour study, Formal and Informal Training: Evidence from the NLSY (1996), that estimates 70% of woirkplace learning is informal. 1996 seems a fair while ago, but so far I haven't seen any more recent update of those figures. Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough yet - I'll keep hunting, but that figure is quite telling, even allowing for a fairly wide margin for error. More on that study in a later post, though.

Conner also bogs at The Ageless Bricoleur. I haven't checked it out thoroughly yet, but it looks very interesting.

There's a wealth of useful links from the article, the main site and the blog. A very good find.

The importance of blogging

Wow - it's three months since the last post! Not that I've been idle over that time, I've been doing some research for the AECT handbook chapter on informal learning, and changed some of the settings on the blog, but I've let the habit of posting to this journal slip. One of the things I found is that I'd somehow set the comments function to only allow comments from blog members - so I've fixed that, it certainly explains why I haven't had any comments...

It's been an interesting experience over the past week or so trying to move from the research stage to the drafting stage. It's been really hard. It makes me realise how much this blog has become part of how I assimilate new material. I chew it through in the postings, and then come back to them not just as aides memoir, but as a kind of pre-digested pre-draft. The blog gives me the opportunity to think things through in a free form, which I can then re-shape to fit the framework of the piece of work I'm drafting. If I try to go straight to the drafting stage, I lose too much around the edges and the lost bits become too distracting, so I can't focus on the line I'm trying to draw. If I just type up notes for myself, it doesn't seem to be sufficiently externalised - it's still just an internal monologue whereas posting provides at least the illusion (intention?) that a dialogue with the wider world is possible. "How do I know what I mean until I hear myself say it?" - the hallmark of a true extrovert!

So the next week or so, I'm going to have to make up some time reviewing the articles I've been reading and seeing where the process takes me. I've got myself a bit behind the eight ball with this piece by letting the posting slide, but I know the general shape of what I want to say, and I've used the highlighting and comments functions fairly extensively so it should be reasonably easy to make up.

So this is my mark in the sand - now I'm just going to have to set to and do some each evening until I catch up with myself.

The Presence Workbook

My Thursday discussion group is turning out to be very interesting, and heaps of fun - as I expected. Some time last week, Andrew gave me a copy of The Presence Workbook. This is a free downloadable resource from www.presence.net/ . It is a companion volume to Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society (2005) by Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski and Flowers, originally published in 2004 as Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future.

A couple of days later William also mentioned it in conversation as a resource that had been recommended to him - so, open as I am to synchronicity, I've been looking at it over the last few days -and, what do you know, it's very relevant to the themes of personal growth, transformative and feral learning, etc. Why am I not surprised?

Theory U At the heart of the presence workbook is The U Theory, " a conceptual framework... for thinking about deep collective change - change that is capable of bringing forth new realities more in line with our deepest aspirations." [The Presence Workbook, p.5].

They identify seven specific capacities essential which can be mapped in a figure U as Suspending (enables us to "see our seeing") , Redirecting (see our part in creating what is), Letting Go and Letting Come (create access to the larger field of possibility), Crystallizing intention (leads to new visions of what is possible), Prototyping (translates vision into actual), and Institutionalizing (new ways of thinking and acting are embedded in sustainable ways).

This transformative process for the learning organization has strong similarities with the internal processes Mezirow describes for transformative learning in the individual. Hooray! Synergy. Agreement. Consistency. This is about as far as I've got with all this so far - more to follow as I work through the rest of it.

I did include some excerpts directly from the workbook in an earlier version of this post, but I realise that doesn't sit well with the copyright statement, so I've taken them off. Look in the workbook introduction to find them.