Over on Brent Schlenker’s blog on corporate e-learning development, we debated through comments on open content course development (wiki approach). He promised to blog more on it later, and I wanted to put down some thoughts as well. As we talk about more learning via social networks in organizations, this is certainly an issue that will come up. Right now blog tools are growing in organizations, and I think that’s great because blogs are a great place to post your opinions. People can comment, but that doesn’t change the original post.
Open Content (learning wiki)
Anybody can contribute to a learning module on any topic, just like a wiki. Collaboration is hugely important, and a team of people who effectively collaborate on something can achieve incredible results far beyond what an individual could create. The Wisdom of Crowds would say that this group of collaborators should be comprised of both experts and neophytes, and the best results will be acheived. Not only could the information have higher quality, but it could be created faster by dividing up the labor. This is a highly valid approach. Soon in NanoLearning you will be able to invite collaborators to edit a piece of NanoLearning. As we’ve seen with the Wikipedia though, content that is acceptable to everybody is interesting to nobody.
Open Market
To continue with a Wikipedia example, what if rather than modifying the JFK entry with my theory on who shot JFK (and having the moderator roll it back), I could create my own Wikipedia entry on who shot JFK. People who prefer my point of view would link to my entry, and people who prefer someone else’s point of view can link to theirs. In a system where people can rate/review/recommend learning chunks the market would recommend each accordingly. The open market approach really doesn’t work with company policies like vacation time, but a microlearning chunk on “How I handled sexual harrassment in my department” might be hugely useful by the HR organization. It might also be a different approach from how another person handled harrassment.
There’s no right or wrong answer, and smart people will use the appropriate tool for the job. But it’s great to discuss and explore the issues. I just wish there were more collaborative content creation tools out there so that we could create some real examples to share, rather than talking about “what if” and “someday.”
Technorati tags: NanoLearning, L2006, microlearning, nano-learning
