I left a comment with Tony Karrer on this theme.

It scares me as a parent and a teacher (never mind a learner) that the debate (here and elsewhere for there’s a few blogs buzzing with this) might spiral away into another universe. There’s nothing down-to-earth that carries any weight these days, for things that are down-to-earth are labelled as 20th C or old-fashioned, modern as opposed to post-modern, inertial, etc.

I used to think that the problem was (Sir Ken Robinson talks about this) that everyone thinks they know what learning/teaching/technology is all about. I now know that this is the problem.

We have knowledge managers, we have technology managers, we even have learning managers (save us!) and they all seem to be so caught up in their own importance they often forget the plot. The burgeoning proliferation of technologies to do the learning doesn’t help either.

It used to be info-whelm. Now we’ve got techno-whelm!

Ka kite

Typically the Web will return hundreds of answers to their query, and many of the responses with contradict others (I’m sure we’re all familiar with this phenomenon).

However, as novices in their craft, they tend not to have the critical faculties acquired through experience by their more senior colleagues to enable them to:

1. Frame the question in such as way as to lower the chances of irrelevant returns and
2. filter the responses to focus on answers that pertain to their coding problem

So, how to identify real experts among all the online conversations? What strategies can knowledge workers implement to reduce the risk of wasting time following dead leads? As learning professionals, how do we support knowledge workers’ efforts to extract meaning and knowledge from “content”?

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

Dave, the “us” I was talking about is those of us in training. Our work environment is very different than alot of other places – for the most part we work with very technical people. Having said that, we also work with very busy people. What I am talking about in this post is starting to think about blending these technologies in with the learning we already offer. How can we do that if no one has the time (and it does take time to come up to speed) to learn this organically?

If you can come up with ways to show the results of the tools, that people who are attracted to the technology will find ways to learn the tools. Nobody cared about wikis until wikipedia came along. Nobody cared about RSS readers until information overload made them a necessity.

I think the thing we have to be careful of is teaching the tools outside of the benefits.

Do we teach the tools, or teach people how to learn about tools, or teach people how to teach others about their favorite tools?

If you go down the path of teaching them tools you have to pre-select the technologies and by the time your courseware is effective the tools you chose have been eclipsed by something else.

The toolset might have to be very rich to support certain knowledge workers. For example, to add images to a repository or blog post they may need to be taught about their digital camera software, techniques for reducing the size of the image, how to upload an image into your particular web tools, how to caption, position, add alt tags, etc. How about a non-photographic image? Do we teach them Photoshop or some other tool? What about sequences of photos, with transitions, pan & zoom? What about audio annotations and soundtracks? The list goes on, and we haven’t talked about the proper ways to represent a snapshot of a spreadsheet or of a 3D object in a CAD program.

Then there’s video…

So I think it’s more important to teach people how to learn tools, and to encourage others to share their learning of particular tools.