Skip to main content

Networked Reciprocal Learning


Sometime back I read an interesting article which says that the half life of technical knowledge (period after which knowledge becomes obsolete) is reducing. A few decades back it was perhaps 10 years which has now come down to 18 months. This has significant implications for training and learning.

The most important implication is "no one knows it all". It is just impossible for a person to know everything in their field. Taking an example from the software industry, in 1996 when people first started working in Java, there were developers who knew all of Java, but as the platform started bulging it became increasingly difficult. Now it is possible to know only a part of the platform really well, and as the platform grows, keeping up with the latest information is even more difficult.

Maybe we need to change the learning and training paradigm. Instead of trainers, we need facilitators who are part of a reciprocating learning network. No one is only a learner or only a trainer. Learners probably are 80% consumers and 20% contributors, while facilitators are 20% consumers and 80% contributors. Everyone should ideally teach and learn in a continuous and informal manner.

To facilitate this, we need to change a few things. The first is "attitude". People need to change the attitude of wanting to be "taught" to taking a more proactive role in their learning. They must actively seek knowledge and mentors in the network. The network must consist of micro-mentors where everyone has strong skills in certain areas, and the network as a whole has sufficient knowledge to meet the needs of the community.

Such networks may actually satisfy the training needs of companies much better than classroom based training.

I think the Internet and new media such as blogs, podcasts, and webcasts, and educational technology holds great promise in helping us creat such networks. We can create a suppporting infrastructure using open source technologies, but more about that in another post... :-)

Labels:

Comments

Aditi said…
I agree to each and every statement here. Lots of companies are also changing their model of classroom programs to collaborative learning. Its an era where knowledge is enriched by contribution of each and every learner.
http://www.adaptivelearningonline.net/ is an excellent move in that direction.
9:55 PM
Parag said…
Hi Aditi,

Thanks for the encouraging comment.

With adaptivelearningonline.net I am trying to unite various pieces that contribute to open learning, in one platform.

I am really glad you like it.
2:16 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Commenting your code

Comments are an integral part of any program, even though they do not contribute to the logic. Appropriate comments add to the maintainability of a software. I have heard developers complain about not remembering the logic of some code they wrote a few months back. Can you imagine how difficult it can be to understand programs written by others, when we sometimes find it hard to understand our own code. It is a nightmare to maintain programs that are not appropriately commented. Java classes should contain comments at various levels. There are two types of comments; implementation comments and documentation comments. Implementation comments usually explain design desicisions, or a particularly intricate peice of code. If you find the need to make a lot of implementation comments, then it may signal overly complex code. Documentation comments usually describe the API of a program, they are meant for developers who are going to use your classes. All classes, methods and variables ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inheritance vs. composition depending on how much is same and how much differs

I am reading the excellent Django book right now. In the 4th chapter on Django templates , there is an example of includes and inheritance in Django templates. Without going into details about Django templates, the include is very similar to composition where we can include the text of another template for evaluation. Inheritance in Django templates works in a way similar to object inheritance. Django templates can specify certain blocks which can be redefined in subtemplates. The subtemplates use the rest of the parent template as is. Now we have all learned that inheritance is used when we have a is-a relationship between classes, and composition is used when we have a contains-a relationship. This is absolutely right, but while reading about Django templates, I just realized another pattern in these relationships. This is really simple and perhaps many of you may have already have had this insight... We use inheritance when we want to allow reuse of the bulk of one object in other ...
3 comments
Read more

Planning a User Guide - Part 3/5 - Co-ordinate the Team

Photo by  Helloquence  on  Unsplash This is the third post in a series of five posts on how to plan a user guide. In the first post , I wrote about how to conduct an audience analysis and the second post discussed how to define the overall scope of the manual. Once the overall scope of the user guide is defined, the next step is to coordinate the team that will work on creating the manual. A typical team will consist of the following roles. Many of these roles will be fulfilled by freelancers since they are one-off or intermittent work engagements. At the end of the article, I have provided a list of websites where you can find good freelancers. Creative Artist You'll need to work with a creative artist to design the cover page and any other images for the user guide. Most small to mid-sized companies don't have a dedicated creative artist on their rolls. But that's not a problem. There are several freelancing websites where you can work with great creative ...
Post a Comment
Read more