I was reminded of one of my early exchanges of views on arrival in the BBC this week. I was curious about the deliberation of the commissioning process and about the edifice that was being created under the learning banner. Coming, as I had, from the rapid fire and restless world of search, this all seemed like a lot of trouble and effort. Having “had my ass handed to me” (as my indelicate US colleagues would say) by Google for seven years, left an impression. An impression of simplicity, function over form, relevance and speed.
There isn’t much, if anything. you can’t learn from a combination of Google, Wikipedia and YouTube.
My recollection is of saying something like “there isn’t much, if anything, you can’t learn from a combination of Google, Wikipedia and YouTube”. I had not been around for long and was struck by how quiet the room had become. In my prior life (as in my current one) this would have been heard as another remark along the lines of “Is there nothing that Google can’t win at?”. That was not the thrust of my point. I was trying to open the idea that an edifice for learning was already there. The curation problem had been solved (in the late 1990s). The content production system was built. Why all the effort to replicate this within the corporation. Not just that corporation, but any corporation.
I remembered this exchange on Thursday over lunch and then later over tea (yes, I took tea and will do so again). Both conversations were about the corporate learning world being trapped in a mode of planning and production. A world that focuses on creating and recreating infrastructure that is better made in the open to publish content that is already there, in the open. And to publish it into a Portal – a digital product format that lost currency around the turn of the century.
I know that security is a major concern for many. Not all sectors are liberal enough to exploit these, now historic, changes. Not everyone is allowed YouTube at work. That will change and we need to help make it change. The temptation to hide behind policy is powerful – it is warm and dry there. I doubt for too long, though. The revolutionary change in learner behaviour came from the outside and the change in providers to corporates will come form the outside too. I suspect new customers with different budgets will open the doors for them.
One response to “Learning on the web – Can it be as simple as that?”
I agree with your conclusion. I suspect that the vendors who will open doors will be those who offer solutions, not learning solutions. Google, YouTube, Wikipedia are not learning tools. Only learning professionals think that. Normal people see them simply as ‘useful’. Every day I see colleagues pushing the ‘learning’ agenda, in denial of the fact that most of their customers resolved to put that all behind them when they left school. Businesses are interested in performance, people in getting things done. We have wrapped ourself in the learning ideal and seem unable to extricate ourselves from it. I think our profession has a lot to offer: we can build resources, we can design experiences, we can contribute to performance & engagement. But not if we insist on blindly pursuing ‘learning’.