If you follow me on Twitter or are friends with me on Facebook, you know that I graduated last weekend with a Master of Science degree from the Instructional Systems program at Florida State University.

Here’s a video to prove it!

FSU has an amazing program. I studied with legends in the field like John Keller and Rob Reiser (who was also my advisor). I was able to take the program as a 100% distance student, which was helpful to be because for the first 2/3rds of my program I had to travel for work.

But my real learning did not happen during my studies. I am lucky to have a very experienced set of people in my organization (Education Services) who did not mind me asking them questions about the things I was studying. It was great to see how we really do have a great system in place to execute formal learning. Thanks Lila, Gene, and Ernie!

Also, where would I be without #lrnchat? Because of this online Twitter chat, I connected with other IS grad students nationwide, as well as professionals and some of the superstars in our field. I got my internship at Pistachio Consulting because of #lrnchat. If I had any question about my studies, I could tweet to the #lrnchat community and I’d get links, questions, or just conversation.

I should also mention #cck08. This course set the stage for the way I would question and evaluate everything in my studies. It also connected me to many individuals whose path is similar to my own.

I feel like I am part of the online learning community. As sad as this is to say – I do not feel as if I am part of the FSU IS community. When I graduated last Sunday, at least one other Master’s student and 3 other PhD students walked. No one from the program arranged anything for us as graduates, not even a meet and greet. None of the faculty were even in town – they were at a conference. The student organization did nothing to recognize the accomplishment.

Now, two wonderful ladies I am connected to via Twitter and Facebook did come to see me. In fact, one fellow student, Lea Ann, even took me all around to get pictures on campus (I got my BS from FSU, and attended as a full-time student in Tallahassee), and came to dinner with my long-time friends who had also come to my graduation. My friend I’ve known since my undergrad days could not believe I had never met Lea Ann in real life before graduation day. I had to explain: we’ve talked on the phone, on Dim Dim, on Skype, via email, and lived together through all the tough times of graduate life. We connected through social tools, found a way to make our own small world, and I think it helped us learn.

I would not have learned much without some community to help me learn, to keep me grounded, to challenge the questions I had about different topics. Since I was a distance student, the University just didn’t know how to make and foster that community. Thank goodness there was #lrnchat.

This is the biggest lesson I learned from my graduate studies: Communities ignite learning.

Would I have still finished my degree if I had not been connected to any community? Yes, most likely. But I wouldn’t have gone as deep, I would not have done as much reflecting, and I would not have be able to integrate what I was learning through my formal studies into my work. To do that, you need a community of people – professional colleagues -  to help you put the formal learning into perspective from a practitioner’s standpoint.

This has huge implications for corporate learning. Formal instruction will always be required. You need it when you are a total newbie to some category of information, or when things have changed dramatically. Since I am in an organization that does technical training, we’ll always have the situations that make formal learning important.

But what happens after formal training?  Once people learn the basics, and go back into their jobs or into the field? What happens when they need a way to put the formal learning into perspective from a practitioner’s standpoint? Harold Jarche has a great post about this where he discusses how social learning is really the way we get things done in knowledge intensive and creative enterprises. In the post, he shows a model of the 5 stages of organization learning as seen by Jane Hart and Jay Cross.

I like these new models, but I don’t think we can learn without being attached to a community. I think formal learning is meaningless if the student doesn’t have a way to connect to a community that will help him or her integrate what they have learned into their thought and work processes.

Maybe the question for the enterprise is: how do you foster communities to which each and every worker can attach?

It’s the last day of December, the last day of 2009, the last day of a decade. But I still want to answer December’s Big Question:

What did you learn about learning in 2009?

Grad School

Personally, I took five graduate courses (for my Master’s degree in Instructional Systems at FSU)

• Development of Computer Courseware: I am not sure if learned anything new about learning in this course – I did learn that my organization at EMC does a very good job of creating computer courseware though!
• Inquiry and Measurement of Instructional Systems: This is the class that started me thinking differences in the language used by education people to describe measurements, and how these differ from language used by MBAs
• Web 2.0 Learning and Performance: I’m not sure if I learned anything new in this class either, but I did get to try out some new ideas I had about aggregating information sources. This is a great class, if you are in the IS program take it when it is offered!
• Introduction to Program Evaluation: This course introduced me to “The Standards“. They are pretty sense guidelines for conducting evaluations, but a nice reference.
• Performance Systems Analysis: This was  my HPT course. As much as we talk about innovation and doing things differently, all systems we analyze (at least from an academic standpoint) are built on principles created by the men who pretty much got us in this mess. Should we be studying them differently – as the bad examples maybe?

Blogging

According to the social signals for my blog posts at eLearning Learning, people liked the printable Twitter Cheat Sheet I posted.

Twitter was big last year. One of the most important additions to my PLE was #lrnchat. How amazing is it to be able to connect with education and performance experts from all fields? The remind me that there are so many ways to look at topics, not to fall into the trap of believing the hype, but to really analyze and evaluate systems…have reasons for the things you suggest and believe. And also not to take it all so seriously, that is nice too.

Another popular post (based on social signals) was one where I tried to find a definition for informal learning. I actually wrote this for one of my executives. I knew if I put my thoughts out there, my PLE would challenge it. And y’all did not disappoint!!

Wrangling with the idea of how to use communities in corporate learning took me back to my undergraduate days (my BS is in Information Studies) many times, especially in a post I made about Communities, PLEs, small groups, & power. This is something I’m still wrestling with. If Social Media is about the social, then finding a way to manage the power networks that allow (and prohibit) connections to networks is critical…especially in a highly political corporate environment. This is probably a core reason you can’t just build it (a community for learning) and expect learners to just show up. I’m sure this will be a big topic for me in 2010 as well.

I also wrote a post explaining how I personally use social media to learn. I compared it to fishing, I guess in a nod to my Gulf Coast heritage. I don’t think I’m unusual, especially for someone who works with technology. I still have to explain to people how important blogging is to me as a source of personal growth. The connections and shared information I’ve made from the blog have really helped me stretch and verify my thought processes.

Wrapping it up..

In summary, I’ve learned that I know lots more about learning than I knew. I’ve also learned that there is so much I have to learn. So, here’s looking to 2010. I’m sure I’ll have more provocative posts, and I’m sure you guys will knock my back down to reality!

I’m writing this as I’m watching the first FSU game of the season. FSU vs. Miami, you can’t get better college football than that.

I’m currently in grad school at FSU – a total distance student since I live in Massachusetts right now. I received my bachelor’s degree from FSU. I grew up in the Florida panhandle. I am a traditional southern girl, I love my college football.

So, what does this have to do with Information stewards and imposters?

Let me set this up for those who don’t know my background. When I was at FSU, some friends and I reinstated the Native American Student Association (NASA). We were a hodge-podged group of descendants from several different nations. Our main goal was to have a place on campus to talk about native things that had nothing to do with the mascot. Before I left I worked hard to turn the group into a union so it couldn’t be eliminated easily.

Those of us who worked on NASA had different personal views on the mascot. I don’t care for the mascot, because the drama the University creates around it sets my alma mater up to be an information imposter.

The definition of an information imposter (from my notes from Elfreda Chatman):

Information impostors are persons within a small group that give the illusion of having knowledge. They jam the information social system with their own psuedo-information, shutting down the information seeking process. In effect, they claim to have given all the information that is necessary, telling members of the small world that they do not need to seek for any more information.

I’m writing this post because of the ESPN hype around this game. This game is epic, and deserves the hype. But the hype around the mascot needs some balance. For instance, if you are going to show the pre-game “Chief Osceola” scene, why not explain what the guy with the flaming spear on the horse supposedly represents.

Osceola, or more correctly Asi-Yahola, was a Muscokgee from Alabama who was forced to emigrate to Spanish-owned Florida as the result of Andrew Jackson’s Creek War settlement. Osceola was never a chief, but a charismatic leader during the Seminole wars. He vehemently fought against removal to Oklahoma.

The pre-game ritual is supposed to pay tribute to Osceola’s actions at the Treaty of Payne’s Landing (1832). This treaty would basically have had the Seminoles cede all their land in Florida to the US, as well as move the entire tribe to Oklahoma – inside of lands already occupied by the Creek nation. No one wanted to go to OK, especially not if they had to live with the enemy Creeks. And the Black Seminoles were certainly not happy to live where they could be taken into slavery just based on their skin color.

During the negotiations at Fort King, Osceola stepped forward, pulled out a knife, plunged it into the treaty that was on the negotiating table and said:

“The only treaty I will ever execute will be this! There remains nothing worth words. If the hail rattles, let the flowers be crushed – the stately oak of the forest will lift its head to the sky and the storm, towering and unscathed.”

So all of this history, from Andrew Jackson’s hatred of Indian people to the mass exodus of indigenous folks from the Southeast to Florida, slave raids, and resistance to removal is now all distilled into pregame highlights.

I love FSU. My undergraduate degree was Information Studies, and I would never have imagined the places that degree would take me, or the worlds it would open up for me. My Master’s will be in Instructional Systems, a program that is a consistently a nationaly top-rated Instructional Design major.

FSU has many top-ranked educational programs such as the two with which I have been involved. We should have a top-ranked Native studies program, just because of where the University sits geographically. But we never will, because for some reason, it is much more important to protect the football legend than it is to educate the people of Florida about the legends that happened on the very ground on which they walk.

I grew up in the Florida panhandle. But I never knew about Osceola outside of FSU. I never knew that Billy Bowlegs was a Seminole. I never knew about the Negro Fort.

But I knew about the FSU Seminoles. How sad.

This is the danger of Information Imposters. Their psuedo-information lulls people into believing there is no other information to be found, so no one launches their own search for information. This is where Information Stewardship comes in. This could help provide checks and balances for the Information Imposters. If the University took up the mantle of Information Steward, even if they always kept the mascot at FSU, the true history of Florida would be just as widely known.

This leads me to think even wider. As educators, or as the people who write, develop, and implement the technical means to distribute and manage information, do we have a broader responsibility to act as Information Stewards? Do we have any moral obligation to make sure that Information Imposters don’t clog the networks with so much irrelevant information that our real shared histories is so obfuscated that is lost?

This quote (“The half of knowledge, is knowing where to find knowledge”) is inscribed over the doors of Dodd Hall at FSU. Apparently no one knows who actually said this, but it seems very applicable to the conversation about the importance of the network in connectivism.

Allison posed this question on my About page.

It was a strange journey. I knew I wanted an advanced degree in Education. I knew I wanted to focus on adult education. I also knew that I wanted a program that 100% distance, since I have to travel sometimes.

I started looking for a program that would help me develop programs for adults on the autism spectrum. But I couldn’t find a program that specific. I looked at the MA colleges, since I am in MA, but I don’t think any of them were 100% distance.

I was an undergrad at FSU, in the Information Studies program. I know from first-hand experience how wired FSU is, so I knew that the infrastructure existed for a distance program. Also, a woman at work (who is now one of my mentors) holds a PhD from the Instructional Systems program. She recommended it to me.

Cost wasn’t a huge factor, but even attending as an out-of-state student is less expensive than attending one of the private colleges in Massachusetts.

Once I started to look at the courses and requirements for FSU, I knew it was where I wanted to go. So far, I have not been disappointed. I am learning technical terms for the techniques we already use in my job. I’m in a place where I can research the new tools and techniques that are being developed for corporate education.

I am really happy with my decision. Although, it is A LOT of work. I have to say I’ll be happy when I have that degree!