Photo Credit: kevin dooley via Compfight cc

I saw this article on Teach Thought last week and thought it was worth consideration from a workplace learning perspective. What ideas do we cling to in LD that don’t do us any favours?  Let’s look at the 7 in the Teach Thought article.

Physical to Digital

One of the saddest sights recently was at the Learning Technologies exhibition at Olympia.  The Learning and Skills part felt like Back to the Future; I was walking back into 1985 with flipchart tools, books, and venues. The analogue face to face side of LD won’t disappear, but expect to be perceived as a vintage oddity like 78s and 8 tracks if you stay there, offering that alone.

Standards to Habits

We had a conversation the other day at work about required qualifications for job roles; I’ve just interviewed and recruited someone with no qualifications in learning. I don’t want someone with a record of achieving passes at tests – I want someone who can learn habits of work. It’s the same with LD activity; stop creating provision to make people ratified/verified/qualified in an area. Plan and support them with skills they can adapt to and with.

Compliance to Play

I love talking through design with people who continuously add in mandatory elements. I will question the use of the mandatory and ask for the statutory elements.  They’re using mandatory to make them feel comfortable – if it’s in the ‘training’ then people will learn it and they’re safe.  Wrong. I’ll deliver the statutory elements that you want to deliver as a framework.  It’s no longer just in case learning.  Anything else outside the framework we’ll support by bringing in gamified elements because  the evidence is being created to suggest that that’s the way people want to learn.

Schools to Communities

Do you have workplace learning academies? Why? Does calling it an educational term suit you or your ‘students’? Let people learn from each other, in ways they choose, with your support NOT control. You can’t control this social aspect of learning so don’t try. They’ll appreciate your help more as a facilitator than your role as a teacher/examiner/curator.

Reaction to Interaction

When a manager come to you to ‘fix’ an issue, you’re in reaction mode and you’ll default to providing.  Stop reacting, create the platforms where people and their managers can interact and you’ll stay ahead of the game.

Isolation to Connectivism

At the contentjam the other day I was disappointed with the lack of connection that the group had with people outside their organisations. If you’re supplying content that is used in isolation, you’re talking in an echo chamber. How will you innovate if  you’re keeping people from connecting with like minded people? If you don’t offer it, someone else will and then LD is redundant.

Privacy to Transparency

You’re not going to limit access to your content are you? I mean, if you’re not testing everything, why lock it down?  Create content and contextual activities that people can pull down when they need.  Encourage them to find something better, to use and share their better content, to encourage self sufficiency. If they still need help, support them when they NEED help, not when they WANT help.

What do you think – what other mindsets do we need to change?  Comments, as always, welcome.