Social Learning Technologies

social learning technologies
Interesting channel 4 social software conference thing here:
One of the most common feelings that I experience when attending conferences frequented by learning professionals is that we end up discussing something called 'learning' which actually has nothing to do with how people actually learn:

At school, children are first and foremost learning how to convince themselves and others that they are cool. They are not learning maths, they are not learning english. And the same is true of us adults: we want to convince ourselves and our peers that we are good at what we do. I am not learning Outlook, I am not learning HTML. And the mechanisms are the same - we observe, we copy, we learn from mistakes, we make useful friends. In this context the kind of thing that is traditionally called 'learning' is really a peculiarly special case: the things people do in classroom courses or when learning online are more often than not a suspension or distortion of natural learning mechanisms ('no talking in class').

This is why, I suppose, classroom training (at its best) is little more than a pretext for social event - where the real value is to be found in the chats and relationships that develop around the training. Likewise, the main complaint regarding online learning is valid: 'we meet no people, we have no chats' - although interesting online environments are beginning to allow you to 'bump into people' and 'strike up a conversation'.

I don't doubt that people can learn from information presentation (i.e. in a classroom or online), but both cases are similar to reading the manual for your VCR cover to cover. It's just weird.

The natural path of learning is as follows: we sit at our desks, we encounter a problem, we use the resources available to us to overcome it; we wonder how we can gain more respect, we observe people who warrant respect in our core groups, we mimic them.
The topic of yesterday's conference was social learning technologies: blogs, wikis, etc. The core issue seemed to be traditional pedagogues struggling to understand how these things relate to 'learning': 'Do I use them to circulate my powerpoints?, Do students work on documents together?'. No. They are just 'people' resources - you have a problem, there are a few more people to ask; you can check out some cool people.