Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: Using web logs for learning
I learn from you: what a terrific site you have! I'm totally behind your approach: we are reading from the same page.
I simply love the comments you have made and collected in your blog: it is a very rich window into the individual and group psychology that I think is everything to understanding how users might use LMS systems.
The references to theater, self-presentation, and creative interaction are simply exquisite. The closest I myself have come such moments have been in highly-structured group work informed by modern cybernetics.
As for my interest in forums and ignorance of blogs: I'd say you are operating in a completely different communicative universe than I find here in Berlin -- though I hope to prove myself wrong.
First, we have very few LMS systems at the FU in general, and most of what passes for "e-learning" here is the creating of "modules" -- electronic versions of texts packaged in Pavlovian form -- and these are indeed designed to occupy the masses. I think much of it has to do with the German university: it is under-capitalized, its relationships to society are ambivalent, and it has nothing of the dynamics of the US system. Somewhere online I've got an article by Mitchell Ash and Daniel Fallon who make the institutional comparison.
On a deeper level, you are assuming a respect for individuals and a high premium on personal expression and communication that, I'd guess for profound historical reasons, does not pertain here.
Let me put it like this: you write like you could take Ben Franklin and a popular enlightenment that began sometime in the mid 18th century U.S. for granted. But the Enlightnment here in Berlin was an elite affair, including Voltaire, King Frederick and the boys for six weeks in the summer in a closed circle in Sanssoucci. It touched the locals much, much later and was all but completely compromised by absolutism. Weimar was a brief flower between immense destruction. Only recently have the universities begun to escape that terrible history.
That is, you BEGIN with the assumption that people expect to learn from each other as much as from the instructor. It would be a very successful class for me here to witness that by the END of a course.
In my view, this is not a fault of individuals -- and I have many colleagues who talk about and prize such communications -- but of a complex society whose relationship to modernity has long been ambivalent and compromised.
So, I'm so grateful to everyone on this thread: it is a pleasure to find myself in such good company!
A large health insurance organization was changing their IT platform to web-based and, more importantly, moving to a proactive customer service business model away from the traditional transaction model. This effort involved learning new technology and new business processes and attitudes. The traditional authoritarian classroom model for training call center workers took 12 weeks and it was then still 9 months before they became fully efficient. Neither of these time frames was acceptable to transform the entire work force so we integrated knowledge management and learning to both drive down classroom time and decrease the learning curve.
So we decided to turn the traditional learning model on its head. We decided that we were not going to train people at all. Instead, we were going to put all the procedures, information, and knowledge to provide customer service and process claims in a KM system available on the job. We made the workers responsible for their own learning but gave them what they needed to do the job. However, we did not just turn them loose on customers. We put them in a two week simulation where they were given claims to process and access to the KM system to support their efforts. Other off-duty employees called in, simulating real customers. A facilitator, not a teacher, was there to answer questions. In order to graduate you needed to use the system to actually do your new job. Those who got through quickly were then asked to help slow learners, encouraging team work.
We also knew that not all the procedures would be documented in the initial efforts and not all those that were would be right. So we created a simple wizard to have employees write their thoughts on procedures they found undocumented as well as their ideas on how to do those that were covered even better. We gave them examples of how to right good procedures, in a help file, so they could better respond to this task. In the simulation they were required to use this wizard to encourage it use on the job. An organization was set up to evaluate and process their suggestions.
According to participant feedback this proved to be the most popular learning program that most participants had ever experienced. At one point when the new overall work IT system was being introduced sometime prior to release, the employees got much more excited about the KM system that we introduced along with the IT system. It even got a standing ovation after a long day of demos and employees said they wanted it right now, even if the overall IT system was not ready.
What excited business leaders was the significant reduction in classroom time and the reduction in learning curve, reducing costs and bringing forward the benefits of the major transformation of the business. What excited the employees was the egalitarian approach Kathleen discussed, although we did not have the benefit of her excellent peer-to-peer framing of the issue at the time. I have seen this occur, in part, in other places but this was the most dramatic. It would be even better in todays tools but worked fine in the old ones.
