The importance of conversation & collaboration in learning

I am indebted to Stephen Downes for this prompt today. I am a subscriber to his OLDaily and can't recommend it highly enough.

Today he pointed to Harold Jarche's post titled The Evolving Social Organisation. Admittedly Harold was really talking about how to implement social learning, but a bit of it resonated in my mind with what needs to happen in formal learning organisations.

It struck me how well this analysis fits what should happen in educational institutions, in classrooms, whether we are talking about students or their teachers:

Listen & Create:
Being open to self-education is the foundation of individual learning. Part of this is the development of habits of continuous sense-making by recording what we hear, read and observe; e.g. personal learning environments (PLE) & personal knowledge management (PKM).

Converse:
Sharing is an act of learning and can be considered an individual’s responsibility for the greater social learning contract. Without sharing, there is no social learning. Through ongoing trusted conversations we can share tacit knowledge, even across organizational boundaries; e.g. social learning.

Co-create:
Group performance enables the creation of new knowledge and is a source of innovation; e.g. collaborative work, customer experience.

Formalize & Share: Some informal knowledge can be made explicit and consolidated through the formalization and creation of new structured knowledge; e.g. taxonomies, document management, storytelling.

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