There's no such thing as formal learning. There, I've said it. I feel much better now. I hope you do too.

In the 18th century our best scientists toiled away in an attempt to determine the essence of phlogiston - the substance which allowed things to burn. Turns out, phlogiston never existed; but once you've given something a name it's easy to think that the name must actually correspond to something. And so it is with formal learning.

I have been reading 'The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning' - and it's helped bring into focus one of the central problems faced by online learning as it develops within the L&D function. The book is pretty good - clearly written by professionals with a background in classroom delivery it focuses on the importance of business alignment, metrics, and implementation techniques which which embed learning. In short some good common sense about classroom training, curated.

The affective context model explains the way in which people learn, everyday – but it is also interesting to consider how it is used in artificial circumstances to bring about learning.

You can picture our evolutionary ancestors moving around an environment, learning as they go. Learning is inherently context-sensitive, because the mind is designed to interpret the world in terms of its affective significance (e.g.

I did the first four minutes of my BETT speech in verse. Here it is. With Thanks to Nick Welch and to Babs for filming.

BETT 2013 from nick welch & barbara thompson on Vimeo.

And here's the text as well:

Learning - what a curious game. Twenty years now and it's looking the same:

classrooms, teachers, something to read. Hotels, long flights, faculty lead.

We learn at work like we learned at school, right?

Wrong! No stress, no working 'till midnight.

I'd like to thank Dan, Karen, Polly and Kirsty for inviting me along to the Consumer Electronics Show, and most of all for the thought-provoking conversations.

I've been reading Greg Urban's 'Metaculture: how culture moves through the world' with a view to understanding how our activities (Online & Informal learning) might be able to affect BP's culture as a whole.

Disaggregated media: you know that thing we did where we made some slides, and we shot a short film, and then built an interaction and a quiz – then  wrapped them all together with 'next' and 'back' buttons and called it ‘a course’? It’s time to stop. Now we think about the useful/powerful bits of media or tools we can create and how they will reach people. 

Visual literacy: Short form video is many things, not one. It is animation, personal account, story, scenario, example, appeal.

I wanted to share this project and am grateful to my colleagues at BP for allowing me to do so.

It had always seemed to me that making significant progress in an area requires an understanding of that area, so for much of the early part of my career the lack of a theoretical basis for learning practice troubled me.

As far as I can tell there are three approaches to designing learning; two of them you probably know about. I’d like to explain the third.

The first approach – the ‘traditional approach’ is content-centric. It starts with the question ‘what do we want these learners to know?’, and employs an ever increasing variety of mechanisms (classroom, online, etc.) to attempt to get stuff into people’s heads. It is, by its very nature, ‘top-down’.

Over the last few months, aided by our developers, we have been building a machine that converts training events into behavioral change. We expect to plug it in and switch it on soon, so perhaps now is the time to talk about it.

The problem was never evaluating training. Anyone with a scientific background will know that an 'independent measures' design will do the job: two groups are created randomly, one receives training the other does not - the effects are clear.
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