anne marie mcewan

 Hi Tia

"It's probably  hard enough to get all bases covered every semester without having to assess, adopt and deploy fancy new processes that may or may not bring something valuable to the learning table."

Correct. Fancy new processes and fancy new technologies at a time, in the UK at least, where the government's desire to increase the intake of 18 - 30 year olds to 50% means that student numbers have escalated with no comensurate increase in resources. My academic pals are not having an easy time of it.

I agree that the dialogue starts where people are - on both sides. And that means giving those of us involved in distance / work-based learning the credit for being as concerned with quality and academic standards as colleagues from more established pedagogic traditions.

Hi Tia

I just skimmed some of the resources you posted. The one that caught my eye was Distance Education: Facing the Faculty Challenge.  Great article. My own experience in trying to promote post-graduate work-based Master's education in a UK university, around 2000, came up against the sort of institutional rigidities the article suggests. (I have only skim read it so might be misinterpreting).

I now use the techniques and methods I used then, and continue to use in a consultancy capacity with the same university and in my own business. I hear from colleagues at the university that there is still concern over quality in work-based programmes. I had stopped arguing about quality with colleagues. Concern with quality is of course appropriate. What I was dscerning was an inability or unwillingness to shift mental models. In designing a wok-based Master's programme, we started with the university-wide definition of the characteristics of Master's level learning - dealing with uncertainty, complexity and demonstrating higher-level cognitive skills like judging, assessing, critically reflecting, choosing, dealing with ambiguity, tensions, paradoxes, trade-off etc. 

Eveything we did  -drafting learning outcomes, shaping asessment criteria, specifying modes of assessment, was rigorous. Probably a bit of a pain to the students. Our early attempts to demonstrate academic rigour may have disadvantaged some students. Then we realised that no matter how we demonstrated our commitment to quality, we were always going to be accused on being not quite academic, just by the very fact that we were doing something different.

How do we begin the dialogue? How do we begin to communicate to people who have worked in a particular way that there is a place for teaching and there are different ways of learning that increasingly have their place in complex, rapidly changing work environments? From what I hear, that particular conversation still needs to take place in this university.

Tia and Therese

Thank you both for a tremendously useful set of resources. I am particularly taken with the Futurelab paper. I could have selected many excerpts for comment but the following allows me to make my point:

"If learning to learn, if collaboration, and if the personalisation of educational experiences are at the core of current educational agendas, we need to find ways of enabling young people to come into contact with, collaborate with and learn from each other and other people."

I realise the paper is focused on the education of young people. Nevertheless, its observations apply equally to organisational learning. In my work with executives, I and my colleagues have been attempting to foster 'learning to learn' skills in a personalised work-based context, experience of which is shared in collaborative conversation and sense-making - most of which takes place face-to-face.

To paraphrase the excerpt from the Futurelab paper, "We need to find ways of enabling everyone in workplaces to come into contact with and learn from each other and other people"

I have been thinking for some time about the feasibility of creating an online 'learning place', and it is only now that I am beginning to explore the concept for real. Futurelab are compiling social learning tools at:

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/projects/why_dont_you

Their categorisation of the headings of talk, personalise, network, explore, and capture is invaluable in helping me get my head around the sort of fuctionality I need to explore. And I would add 'stuff' (source, tag, share ...).

Thanks again.

Anne Marie

Hello everyone

My name is Anne Marie McEwan. I am currently growing my business, The Smart Work Company, in the UK.  The company provides research on global workplace trends, strategic brainstorming workshops, and design and facilitation of action learning programmes for senior executives.

It seems to me that work-based, situated learning and social media are made for each other.

The practical issues I have so far experienced are around diversity - cultural differences, differences in communication preferences (formal and informal), differences in degrees of comfort with social media technologies, etc ...

I am hoping to learn from others and to share more of my own experience. How do you approach diversity? Although you can't please all the people all the time, can different portfolios of technologies be assembled for particular learning groups / teams (having performed some initial profiling)?

Looking forward to learning together.

Anne Marie

I am Anne Marie McEwan. I have worked in work-based learning, on and off, for the past seven years. This has been mainly designing and facilitating strategic learning programmes for senior executives, although I did spend some time researching student and staff support in work-based learning.

I was working intensively last year on a joint collaboration between a UK university and Russian academy, designing and facilitating programmes for very senior executives. Having helped set up the programme, I now supervise a number of these executives, including one who works for a large telecommunications company, another introducing private sector governance into a municipal context, and yet another with responsibility for the strategic expansion of an engineering design company.

Supervision has been mainly face-to-face and individual. I want to extend this to include online group tutorials.

I am really looking forward to sharing and learning through this active learning forum.