I’m running a session later today at the CIPD L&D show. It’s a workshop about autonomous learning.

A workshop, face to face, looking at creating stuff.

About learning autonomously, self directed, on your own.

How’s that going to work? It feels oxymoronic to be working through a workshop with a group of people on how they can support people to learn autonomously.

When I put the session together I had planned to  put the content up beforehand, let the participants see it, prepare their musings and reflections from what they’d learnt on their own. And then I realised that this was the worst thing to have done. If learning autonomously was the desire of the participants, wouldn’t they have done that already? So building my session today I’ve assumed that the people there want more than just information about what autonomous learning is.

David D’Souza picked this up in a blog post about classroom learning. In it, he states

The one thing that classroom learning still does effectively is ringfence time

I don’t know why the people are coming to the session today; part of the session will be about finding out why they’re there. If you’re coming to the session I’ll want to know your motivations for being there.

What I will do is make sure that your ringfenced time is used well. If I’m not, please tell me.