It's a 'something' ...

Rachel Burnham writes:  Whenever I write a blog, I always feel slightly apprehensive about its reception and more so, when it contains strong opinions or personal stories. 

Today, I feel this particularly, as I want to share a story from my involvement in my local church and I know that that most people who will read this won’t be Christian and may be of another faith or of no faith.  But I have decided to go ahead anyway because the focus of this story isn’t religious but is, always in this blog, L&D.  

Anyway, enough preliminaries…on with the story.

Some years ago, I was part of a small working group from our church with charged with the task of helping to build relationships between the congregation and the community.  To my great delight, this was not a committee, nor a talking shop, but a small group of five that generated ideas and put them into practice, not on our own, but working with lots of other people, both within and outwith the church.  I hadn’t thought of this before writing this blog, but interestingly out of the five, three of us ran our own businesses – an L&D consultant, a painter & decorator and (appropriately) a carpenter – I wonder if we had an entrepreneurial bias?

We did all sorts of things, some traditional, many not.  We had some great successes; some middling successes, which we built on; and some out and out flops – in relation to the latter a summer outing to hear brass bands particularly comes to mind!

What was interesting was the way the group worked.  It was a great group to be a part of – we often disagreed, but no one was negative for the sake of it, no-one was grandstanding, people listened and built on other people’s ideas.  I remember lots of conversations which included ‘why don’t we…’ ‘would it be possible….’ ‘how could we make that work?’ ‘and we could also…’ ‘alternatively we could…’  and lots and lots of laughter.  

One of the many things that made us laugh, was the phrase ‘It’s a ‘something’…’ which we used very frequently.  It was a phrase we used when we were developing an idea, but wanted to keep it fluid.   It allowed us to explore possibilities, without the limitations of placing a label on what we were planning.  We would identify the characteristics of the ‘something’ – its purpose, who needed to be involved, who we would like to be involved, its look & feel and so on, but leave open what it was until we were well down the road with imagining it. 

In my work as an L&D consultant, I often work with people new to L&D (and some who are not so new to L&D), who are quick to jump to talking about designing & delivering a face to face ‘training’ session.  I know that many stakeholders in organisations can also be quick to make that leap.  I spend a lot of time encouraging a more open approach, which might include blended learning options or even alternatives to face to face learning sessions or formal learning.   There is such a range of possibilities that can meet learning needs and help improve performance - it is important to consider what will be most effective in that particular situation and not to shut off worthwhile avenues from the outset.

It helps to use language thoughtfully to ensure we haven’t already made assumptions – so sometimes I talk of learning ‘solutions’ – though that always sounds to me, too finished and polished, for a process that might be rather more emergent and evolving.   Sometimes, I use learning ‘intervention’ – though that always sounds such a jargon term (even to myself) and also as though it is done to you, rather than with you.

Which brings me back to using ‘it’s a ‘something’…’ .  Messy, open, full of potential and possibilities, specific to context – just what L&D should be.

Rachel Burnham

14/4/16

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals become even more effective.  I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of learning on performance.

Follow me on Twitter @BurnhamLandD

'Embracing Change' CIPD Leaders in Learning Sketchnote

Rachel Burnham writes: Marnie Threapleton, from the benchmarking organisation, Towards Maturity, spoke at the CIPD Leaders in Learning session in Manchester on Thursday 10 March 2016.  She spoke about their benchmarking report ‘Embracing Change’ and the importance of working with business leaders, the self-directed learner and equipping the L&D team (see my previous blog on this topic ‘Hurdling Tips for the Cobbler’sChildren’.   Here is my Sketchnote of her session.

 

Rachel Burnham

13/3/16

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals become even more effective.  I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of learning on performance.

Follow me on Twitter @BurnhamLandD

On loving home grown tomatoes and what that's got to do with learning

Rachel Burnham writes: Like a great many people I much prefer home grown tomatoes to the ones bought in shops – in depth of taste and scent they are far superior.  The tomatoes in our allotment greenhouse aren’t quite ready to pick yet this year – but their distinctive slightly spicy scent is already in the air and the vines are filling with warm orange globes – maybe by the end of the week, we’ll get our first pick.  

 

Courgettes, lettuce, yellow rasberries and of course tomatoes - crop 2014

On our allotments, which we share with another family, and for which I can take precious little credit for this year, we grow lots of different fruit and veg – potatoes, onions, shallots, garlic, broad beans, runner beans, little purple beans, rhubarb, strawberries, raspberries (personal favourite), spinach, chard, white carrots and so on.  In my view, the flavour of pretty much any of these is better than the shop-bought equivalents – something to do with picking when actually ripe; freshness due to less distance to travel; and of course being able to favour flavour over appearance, when picking which varieties to grow. 

I like home-made jams and pickles – and sometimes manage to make my own, but if I can’t get home-made it is great to get ones made by smaller producers with higher fruit content and fewer additives.  I have a great affection/craving for damsons and in recent years we have done a family trip to the Lyth Valley in Cumbria in order to get fresh damsons and secure essential damson jam supplies for the year.  This is the kind of jam that the big producers just don’t make – it is where artisan producers come into their own – though at a cost.

I love to cook and produce food from basic ingredients.  Nothing fancy.  An essential part of my weekend is making soup.  I make lots of meals from beans and lentils, having been vegetarian since my teens, with an emphasis on what is in season and available locally.

In fact, it would be fair to say that I love everything about food, cooking, growing it and of course, eating it.

And I love everything about learning – identifying what’s needed & what’s not, planning, designing, curating, facilitating, sharing and of course learning myself.  

But not everybody feels the same about cooking or learning.    

Some people say that they don’t know how to cook and that they can only do a few things and so get bored with what they can make themselves and rely on take outs or ready meals – always on the look-out for something new.   Others feel it is a waste of valuable time to cook and they’d rather get on with living – and I do seem to spend an inordinately large amount of time growing, preparing and washing up afterwards – the time seems worth it to me and a necessity that is part the richness of life rather than an alternative.   More parallels with learning.

 

Chard 2014

Of course, there are many whose choices around cooking are limited by poverty, even in this country and whose access to fresh ingredients, fruit and vegetable is limited by budget - where just getting enough for the whole family to eat is an achievement. 

And there are some people who love fast food – the pizzas, the burgers, the chips and the kebab.  Often the sights and smells of this have an immediate appeal – at a fun fair pink candyfloss can have its attractions – a bit like conference speakers who are full of jokes, funny hats and easy models.   Not that there is anything wrong with the occasional bit of fast food - I have a soft spot for the veggie burger made by one of the major burger chains and nothing, but nothing beats fish and chips after a cold November afternoon working on the allotment.

But the best meals, like the best learning opportunities, involve a number of aspects:

• Being hungry; 
• Fresh, quality ingredients – not disproven theories, or models pulled out dusty from the back of a cupboard;
• Skills in putting them together – more on this in a moment; and
• Presentation – my father could never understand my mother ‘fussing’ over the presentation of food and wanting to have a nice mix of colours in the food on the plate.  But presentation of food and learning does make a difference to the appetite for each.

Some of the best meals are the simplest, only needing basic skills that anyone of us could do with a bit of support.  Not every meal needs to be Michelin starred creation.  

I’ve learnt so much from home-made YouTube videos – production values not always that great, sometimes with a pause whilst the host puts the barking dog out of the room, but free, easily accessible and effective.   Not unlike scrambled eggs with mushrooms and grilled tomatoes (home grown, of course).

Sometimes, it is time with friends/family/colleagues that makes a meal special - the conversation, the exchange of ideas, the understanding of background & context.  The food is only an excuse – a starting point for the real feeding.  And the skills involved may not be in the content creation (the cooking) but in hosting and facilitating those conversations.

Sometimes it is right and proper to give a meal the full works – a relaxed setting, the elegantly nuanced menu, the skilfully prepared dishes, the choice of wine, the doggy bag to take home.

Just as with our eating habits, so we need to adopt a healthy approach to learning – it can’t all be restaurant meals or fast food, but a mixed and varied diet.  Home grown learning can be rich in flavour, contextual, simple but effective.

This is something that many in L&D are grappling with.  And more of us need to.

The occasional stick of candyfloss won’t do you any harm, but don’t mistake it for real food.

Rachel Burnham

2/8/15

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals become even more effective.  I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of learning on performance.

Follow me on Twitter @BurnhamLandD

Social - it's a little bit like water

Photo: Berit Watkin under Creative Commons Attribution License

Rachel Burnham writes: In February I took part in the Curatr based MOOC #exploresocial, in which we were examining what social learning is and why it is valuable to organisations right now.   I got thinking about this again yesterday, after reading Mark Britz’s post ‘Social Inconvenience is Important’ which was all about when and where people connect.   And suddenly, I was thinking about social learning and social networking as being like water.

Ubiquitous

Water is everywhere around us on this planet. In the sea, the rivers, the air and in living things, including ourselves.  Social is a bit like that too – it isn’t just limited to social media or the use of technologies in learning – it is there every day, everywhere, every time we have a conversation. 

I remember when it suddenly became fashionable to drink bottled water in the UK and we were all urged to drink up to 8 glasses of water a day, as though we had never drunk a glass of water before and as though every cup of tea or coffee isn’t made with water!  And that is where we are at the moment with social learning – we are in danger of bottling up social with technology and fancy labels, when what we need to be doing is recognising where it already is and how we can simply make better use of it.

Powerful

Water is an incredibly powerful force.  Water has shaped our planet. Ice and rivers have carved out valleys and rearranged the landscape.   The sea and tides have changed the shape of this island and continue to do so – cutting away at cliffs and creating new land spits.

Social is powerful too.  We are only just learning how powerful it can be in shaping our political & social landscape.  We are only just exploring how social can enable people to work and connect together within and without organisations in new networks and formations.  If you want to read more about this then I would recommend Harold Jarche's blog.

The drip, drip effect  

One of the ways that water acts is by the slow accumulation of individual droplets of water that gradually seep through seemly impenetrable surfaces; that in caves make beautiful rock formations – stalactites and stalagmites – reaching out almost as though trying to connect.

Through social we are influenced one conversation at a time, one droplet of information, one tweet, one blog at a time.  But together the cumulative effect, the overall learning can be immense.

And the tsunami wave

Sometimes water is overwhelming and devastating in its almost instant impact.   And social has its nasty, destructive side too in trolling and social bullying – leaving wreckage in their wake.

Water flows

Water flows where it will, working its way gradually downhill.   It follows the gradient.  Rivers, streams, brooks, becks and burns all flow downwards. 

 

Which brings me back to Mark Britz’s post yesterday.  You can’t force people to connect in one place or another.  An organisation can’t mandate the use of an enterprise social network.  People will connect when they find it brings value to themselves - when it makes their lives easier or helps them learn or is fun. People will go where the flow is.  

Moving water up a slope is tricky and hard work.  Getting people to connect when it doesn’t meet a need for them, will need the equivalent of an Archimedes' screw, the ancient technology which it is thought was used to water the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Social is a bit like water. 

Rachel Burnham

16/4/15

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals become even more effective.  I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of learning on performance.

Follow me on Twitter @BurnhamLandD

Sweet Spots, Fast Food and Slow Food

Rachel Burnham writes: As you may know I am currently participating in a most interesting MOOC, which is all about social learning.  This blog is being written at the end of week 3 of 4 weeks and we have spent this week thinking about informal & formal social learning.   This is a Working Out Loud blog as I am sharing my learning from this week (and earlier weeks) and make no claims about having completed my thinking on these topics!
 

I have 5 thoughts to share with you from this week’s study:

1.  The Relationship Between Informal & Social Learning  

There is a big overlap between social learning and informal learning.  When I use the term ‘informal learning’,  I refer to all those learning methods which are outside of formal learning or education.  A great many of the methods of learning that we describe as informal learning involve social learning ie learning with and from other people.  I recently wrote a blog about informal learning which included a diagram attempting to categorise a range of informal learning methods and if you read the blog, just how many of these methods do also fall under the heading of social learning. This is one of the factors in the confusion that surrounds these terms.

However, it is important to note that not all informal learning involves social learning – there are many ways of learning informally as an individual and I will return to this point latter on.  There are also aspects of social learning that are formal and we can immediately identify workshop based sessions, webinars/virtual classrooms and action learning sets as learning methods that are definitely social but are clearly also formal.

2.  The Relationship Between Informal, Social and Formal Learning

Each of these types of learning has a valuable contribution to make to learning in the modern workplace.  At present too many organisations still rely primarily on formal learning only.  Or rather only acknowledge the part that formal learning plays in the development of knowledge, skills and behaviours for performance at work.  Informal and social learning have always gone on in organisations – people learn by chatting with their colleagues or observing how an effective manager tackles a project or by vowing never, ever to speak to someone in the way that they have just experienced themselves (reflection).  Micheal Eraut spent years studying how people learn in practice and has developed some interesting models which I explore in this previous blog post ‘Lift Off for Informal Learning’.  


The challenge for L&D professionals is to work out how we can most effectively support, encourage and enable informal & social learning in our organisations.  To do that we need to be clear about when each of formal, informal and social is most effective.  It is about making effective choices to suit the context.

We can also combine these through designing scaffolded or guided blended learning programmes as Jane Hart describes them, which combine aspects of the structure of formal learning with the openness, flexibility and individualised nature of informal learning.  Providing access to curated collections of resources which learners are encouraged (but not required to access) can be part of this.  Such programmes can also incorporate opportunities for informal social learning eg through sharing of resources (co-curating) & sharing information/tips/ideas/experiences perhaps through the use of social media. 

3.  Understanding the Value of Social & Informal LearningIt is helpful to appreciate the distinctive benefits of each type of learning to know how best to make use of it. 

Social learning brings with it: 
 

·       Access to information & expertise in a timely fashion

·       Different ideas/experiences

·       Alternative perspectives

·       Opportunity to question & be questioned

·       Opportunity to work co-operatively with others on common issues or problems

Most particularly in the words of Lynda Gratton in ‘The Future of Work’ ‘social will simply become much more important in the future because it fits dynamic learning environments.’

4.  Downsides to Social Learning

The main downside to social learning that I have become aware of is a risk of ‘groupthink’ developing, particularly in social learning environments where there is an absence of critical thinking.   Two factors can particularly affect this I think: social learning in contexts where there is a lack of external contact and secondly, where there is limited engagement with theory.  

In the first case I am thinking about the situation that arises in some organisations where the organisation is very inward facing, perhaps working in silos internally and then further exacerbates this by limiting opportunities for contacts & networking.  This can come in the form of reduced budgets for travel, limited opportunities to step away from operational duties even for short times, discouragement of the use of social media for work use or even an organisational culture that emphasises the distinctiveness & uniqueness of the organisation.  I have experienced this kind of environment occasionally when providing an in-house programme for L&D teams – a culture can develop where social learning leads to the development of clones, where a single idea of ‘best practice’ can be arrived at & then stuck with and a lack of challenge flourishes.  (Just to be clear - I am currently working with an in-house team and my experience is very different with this present team, but this is why I was so keen for each member of the team to have access to a mentor from outside of the organisation.) I think for social learning to be healthy, we need access to a diverse network.



Secondly, for social learning to be healthy and not just some kind of collective folk wisdom, it needs to be tested against theory and particularly evidence based research.   Our practice needs to be informed by theory and the theory needs to keep pace with & in turn be informed by practice – ie  we need to explore praxis rather more consistently than we often do.    

@conmossy shared a very relevant quote as a result of the Twitter Chat on 18/2/15 by Kirk

‘the possession of knowledge without the capacity to effect professional actions of various kinds is pointless; professional action that is not informed by relevant knowledge is haphazard; and knowledge and skills that are not subjected to self-criticism constitute a recipe for professional complacency and ineffectiveness.’  (Kirk, G ‘The Chartered Teacher: A Challenge to the Profession in Scotland’  Education in the North, 11 10-17, 2004)

5.  Social Learning is great, but don’t forget individual learning

In exploring and appreciating the huge value of social learning, let’s not forget that individual learning has its place and value too.   There are many forms of informal learning that are about individuals learning – on their own, at their own pace, thinking their own thoughts and experimenting & reflecting.  Donald Clark in his blog ‘9 Reasons Why I am Not a Social Constructivist’ reminds us of the value of individual learning and also of its particular importance to introverts.  Perhaps I should own up here to my own introversion and how much I enjoy & need time and space on my own as part the way I learn most effectively.   

Sometimes social learning experiences, whether traditional formal approaches or informal approaches can feel rather ‘fast food’ approaches to learning – with their speedy give & take and sometimes little opportunity to slow down, ponder, question and pause.  In those circumstances, I know I struggle sometimes to share deeper reflections or to think critically.  

I think there is a value in more of a ‘slow food’ approach to learning from time to time.  The ‘slow food’ movement is all about food that is cooked from scratch, often using traditional slower cooking methods such as ‘braising’ ‘marinating’ and ‘oven-roasting’, with fantastic fresh locally produced ingredients.  Actually in learning terms, including asynchronous social learning methods, such as discussion forums, which naturally enable opportunities for pause and reflection can be a ‘slow food’ method. 

Adopting more of a ‘slow food’ approach doesn’t mean abandoning social learning, but adopting more of a balanced diet between social and individual learning.  The precise proportions may vary from individual to individual – introverts among us may prefer a slight higher proportion of individual learning, to the extroverts in the population, but we all need both approaches, I would suggest. 

Or we could explore the ideas suggested by Andrew Jacob’s 'Silent Disco' blog and find ways for individual learning at its own pace, but within a social context.  I think that is what we do with blogging – people share their learning individually but by sharing our blogs and then reading & commenting on others we are subtly influenced and learn together. 

As always, I welcome your thoughts and ideas – and feel free to take some time to ponder on them if you would prefer!

Rachel Burnham

23/2/15

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals become even more effective.  I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of learning on performance.

Follow me on Twitter @BurnhamLandD