Online Learning -- More Suited to Us Introverts?

As we design for online learning environments, how often is the social aspect of introversion/extroversion taken into account?  Over the last few discussions in my class, the notion of who the audience is culturally, socially, etc has come up.  While I do believe that in an online environment, there are allowances for learners to either be completely themselves or another character altogether, there is the opportunity for those who are more introverted to have an enhanced learning experience over in-person education.  As an introvert myself, I feel that there are some key justifications for this sentiment:

1. More opportunity for reflection, critical thinking and research prior to contributing an idea, comment or answer.
2. More opportunity in a forum to express one's full opinion and ask questions
3. More opportunity to connect with other learners in an open or private environment.

I was inspired partially due to my experience in this course environment (as a first time Pepper user) and also by a TED talk by Susan Cain on Introverts.  Introduced to TED talks by a couple peers in this course, I've found them to be insightful, thought-provoking and some questionable, but a great source for inspiration and further inquiry into a specific topic.

Social Media and Situated Learning

A work about the upcoming blog posts:  You'll have to forgive me for the stream of things.  I did a blogger taboo...or what seems to be and that's writing it offline first and then transferring these posts to the screen.  You see, not always having an internet connection or my netbook on hand, it was more convenient to go back to traditional means of journaling...at least for a short while.  This and the next two posts were written offline first. However, linking and graphics are done live while posting.

  Social media and social networking has quickly made a fan out of me over the last decade.  I remember starting my undergrad at the University of Toronto in the mid 90's and getting introduced to the world wide web.  I had no idea what was to follow.  How consuming it could be.  How far-reaching it would take me.  How much knowledge and fiction and all the likes-in-between that I would find there.  I recall the line-ups to get a standing spot at a library computer, the max. thirty minute usage (which didn't take you very far, especially when things were on dial-up speed!).  Oh were these ever exciting, adventurous and trying times!  I would even argue, that it was 'legitimate peripheral participation' (Lave & Wenger (1991)).  This community of students as we were, congregating daily in the library commons, waiting for that elusive spot to access the world wide web, observing other's already in the 'spot' waiting for the little hourglass to stop spinning and bring on a new page of wonder.  We talked of websites and webpages to visit and to avoid, we exchanged familiar glances of anticipation and of frustration when a page took long to load, eating up precious coveted minutes of use.  We were all learning to us this new phenomenon individually and together.  A situated learning experience that you didn't necessarily have to sign up for.


Lave & Wenger (1990) describe situated-learning as learning which:

• takes place in an authentic environment and, ideally, the setting and context in which that learning would normally be applied; 
• is  facilitated by interaction and collaboration between colleagues (i.e. a community of practice);
• cannot  be achieved in a organisational setting, without the consent of all stakeholders.

In that space at time, I believe we were in an authentic setting where learning would be applied...the library is inherently a learning setting after all isn't it?  There was certainly interaction and collaboration, seeming we were a community of practice (students learning to use the internet and electronic communication, sharing what we learned with each other--I recall the exchange of email addresses, the "could you send me that link to that site..", etc). And, alas, the consent...the building camaraderie, the sharing of information readily, the helping your partner at the computer beside you while waiting for your webpage to load, the welcoming smiles as you recognized someone who helped you yesterday...yes I'd say there was consent.

It's been a long time since the days of that communal off/online setting.  But, I realized that it still exists and it keeps morphing, especially as we learn and adapt to new social media and social networking.  I may not physically be standing beside someone in a community of practice, but now virtually on a discussion board offering advice to a new mom, or to a group of friends posting about where to find the best travel deals, or professionally about a particular practice in an industry.  Whether its Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn (or one of the many many other social apps out there), I realized that learning is non-stop, it's everywhere, its accessible. 

It quite reminds me of Peter Senge's concept of the learning organization.  Where people are continually learning, formally, informally, etc.  Where new patterns of thinking are constantly emerging and shifting.  Sometimes you're participating directly from within the circle, sometimes from the peripheral by simply absorbing and learning.

Social networking, once feared by organizations, is now being embraced by many as a way of enhancing workplace learning and employee engagement.  Who would have thought, the once banned sites (IT denied access at work) of past, would be sought for organizational learning and success.  An example of this is when I discovered that my organization had a "group" page on Facebook made up of employees, at first informally organized, but later used more formally by the organization to hold discussions on particular events, ideas, happenings, and for sharing new information on other learning opportunities or call for participation in other sub-groups. 

Adult education, workplace situated learning, has certainly come some way with the inclusion/infusion of social media in the everyday.  It will be exciting to see how things continue to morph in the organizational and community environments, in the context of work and outreach.  I leave with one take on the Future Workplace.

References:

Lave J. and Wenger E. (1991) Situated Learning. Legitimate Peripheral Participation, 

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Senge P. (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization, 

Century Business/Doubleday.

Distributed Cognition Through Informal Adult Education

Learning is everywhere.
Thus, I hypothesize that distributed cognition is crafted informally and faster and faster as technology has increasing becoming a larger part of people's everyday lives.  People, artifacts and technology coming together almost constantly.  I can't tell you how many times I've been walking somewhere and a question about the place comes up and i whip out my trusty blackberry, one click to Google and voila I've go 326 links in .98 seconds to potentially answer my question. Or the other option, text a friend. Or another option, poll on twitter or facebook.  This is resembling who wants to be a millionaire more and more, yet no really money to be made.

However, the winning is the informal learning or rather informal constant knowledge building.
We've somehow come to create an insatiable need for answers to our questions here and now.  Long gone are the days of when i would go home, ask my parents, or pull out the index book of our Collier's Encyclopedia collection and proceed to find the key work that would lead me to the correct volume, page and paragraph in which i would hope to find my answer.  If I didn't well, then it was back to the drawing board of solutions.

Today, we can't leave home without our smart phones, tables, netbooks or laptops.  Is this truly a good enabler of informal learning and distributed cognition or are we just going to burn ourselves out with?

Hollan, Huchins, and Kirsh of the University of California, discuss this relationship further in:  Distributed Cognition: Toward a New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research .

Situated Learning in Online Communities & Discussion Boards

Over the last week or two, as a consequence of participating in the online discussion forum for class, I had much opportunity to reflect over the various e-learning experiences I've had in the last decade of my career.  Lave and Wenger enticed me to really consider what i had defined as "situated learning"  and how we tossed around the terms "community of practice" and "community of learning" in the workplace.  What I had thought it to be in context of work, was that a community of practice was a group of people connecting and networking for the purpose of knowledge-sharing and support as people within a particular profession.  As an example, for online courses we designed for nurses and supportive care staff, there were discussion forums facilitated to discuss practice issues, challenges, and changes, which was set up in each e-learning course.
My thinking of a community of learning was that it was a group of people, not necessarily of the same profession, coming together online to share information related to a common topic of interest.  As it turns out, the term for what i'm describing is actually referred to as a "learning community."  Peter Senge, who defined the learning organization, discusses this concept as a necessary element in a learning organization.

In the workplace, if we look around, there are lots of communities.  Communities of managers, communities of staff of a similar profession, of staff of similar level, but differing profession, of staff of common projects and objectives, but differing profession and level, etc.  How the participants in these communities interact, whether in person or online is important, but the knowledge sharing and building that occurs is the real key.  In coming posts, I will look closer at these shared interests and artifacts and collaborative relationships when our class examines distributed cognition and intelligence.
In the meantime, take moment to reflect on some of the online communities you're a part of, most commonly through places like facebook, linkedin and twitter groups. Why did you join?  What were your looking to learn?  How have you shared your knowledge?  There are some very savvy things happening in many corners of the web, a very interesting site i came across is Social Logical.  Here we can see how many players of different means, backgrounds, geographies come together online for a particular purpose and learn from one another about social business.