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... :-)

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.
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.

Popular posts from this blog

My HSQLDB schema inspection story

This is a simple story of my need to inspect the schema of an HSQLDB database for a participar FOREIGN KEY, and the interesting things I had to do to actually inspect it. I am using an HSQLDB 1.8 database in one of my web applications. The application has been developed using the Play framework , which by default uses JPA and Hibernate . A few days back, I wanted to inspect the schema which Hibernate had created for one of my model objects. I started the HSQLDB database on my local machine, and then started the database manager with the following command java -cp ./hsqldb-1.8.0.7.jar org.hsqldb.util.DatabaseManagerSwing When I tried the view the schema of my table, it showed me the columns and column types on that table, but it did not show me columns were FOREIGN KEYs. Image 1: Table schema as shown by HSQLDB's database manager I decided to search on StackOverflow and find out how I could view the full schema of the table in question. I got a few hints, and they all pointed to

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

Fuctional Programming Principles in Scala - Getting Started

Sometime back I registered for the Functional Programming Principles in Scala , on Coursera. I have been meaning to learn Scala from a while, but have been putting it on the back burner because of other commitments. But  when I saw this course being offered by Martin Odersky, on Coursera , I just had to enroll in it. This course is a 7 week course. I will blog my learning experience and notes here for the next seven weeks (well actually six, since the course started on Sept 18th). The first step was to install the required tools: JDK - Since this is my work machine, I already have a couple of JDK's installed SBT - SBT is the Scala Build Tool. Even though I have not looked into it in detail, it seems like a replacement for Maven. I am sure we will use it for several things, however upto now I only know about two uses for it - to submit assignments (which must be a feature added by the course team), and to start the Scala console. Installed sbt from here , and added the path