Ken Carroll

 Note: This post is one of several in this month’s Work/Learning Blog Carnival over at Manish Mohan’s blog. 

Mixing sociology with education was not something language teachers did in the past. Nor was it something that hard-headed managers did in the work environment. Recently, however, we have all been forced to look at learning in social networks and online communities. The web is creating new social structures that pertain to learning, but we understand very little about their dynamics. Sociology is providing some insights.

In this vein, I am reading the excellent,’ Communities of Practice,  Creating Learning Environments for Educators’.  The book edited by two British academics, Chris Kimble and Paul Hildreth.  Professor Kimble describes his work as  ’socio-technical in the sense that I am interested in how best to ‘manage’ the fit between technology and the social world’ and he has written on the subject of learning networks in the past.

The (2 volume) book is highly informative and thought provoking. The first volume deals with colocated (offline) CoPs, while volume 2 looks at distributed or virtual environments.

For a newcomer (like myself) there is sometimes the feeling that sociological observation tends towards stating the obvious. (This is an issue I also had with Clay Shirky’s recent book until I got into the mindset). The very concept of a CoP has left several of my management and academic colleagues non-plussed. (’If they have always existed then what’s the big deal?’) There is something slightly elusive about these concepts on  first blush.

Finding the value, however, comes down to what you’re looking for. This book hammers home the fact that social/group formats radically influence the way we learn. In a virtual environment, this is precisely what I have been looking for, so the insights are particularly welcome. Interestingly, however, many of  the observations apply equally well to colocated groups and especially for teacher training. I’m not sure why we language tachers have so studiously ignored this line of thinking for decades, but generally speaking, we have.  

 Applying it in the workplace

But there are other applications, and the work environment is one. Let me give you an example of a simple concept that I was able to cull from the book and apply in a concrete way in my own work. Volume 1 has a chapter called The Reflective Mentor Model, by Robbin Nicole Chapman. The author takes Papert’s (1980) notion of Constructionism to show that ‘people learn best when actively engaged in designing and building construcing artifacts to share with and critique by others’.

As it happens, I recently found the perfect context in which to apply this constructionist approach and it has worked very well. At the moment, we’re in the process of inducting (training?) some new hosts for the podcast lessons - we’ll be launching FrenchPod and ItalianPod. Instead of simply telling them how to do that we’ve focused them on producing ‘artifacts’, that is samples of the lessons they eventually aspire to. We encourage participatns to produce a much as possible - a lesson per day, for example. After that, we get together with them as well as practitioners of differing levels/experience, to reflect, discuss, and offer feedback.

The focus on doing has been literally very productive. Discussion are focused and concrete, the process of learning, visible. We blog as we go along, and we link to samples of the artifacts as we do so. We’ve also started recording the feedback sessions themselves and linking to those, too.  

This approach has been very beneficial on many levels. For one thing, we are now developing an archived history of the learning that can be used in the future, including learner comments and all the rest. Most of all, the new hosts are learning the skills in an efficient and productive way. They are learing by doing, in collaboration with people who have a level of expertize in the field.  

This particular initiative is no more than a few weeks old, but I can see how some of the concepts that underlie group dynamics  could be very powerful in teacher training - powerful enough to unsettle how the whole thing has been done for so long. I hope too, that I’ve shown how one simple idea was applied to a real work situation effectively.

I’ve taken many new insights from this book, but I’ve only had time to go into one of them. One thing is sure, though, there’s mileage in this socoiology stuff after all.

Ken Carroll

 All advances in human communication tend to create larger effects. When, for example, our early ancestors developed the whites in their eyes, it greatly enhanced non-verbal communication. This resulted in new and more complex types of social collaboration and drove human development forward. We have never looked back, as it were.

 These days, advances in communication come from technology, rather than biological  progress. Technology, however, develops thousands of times faster than biology, so its effects can be both widespread and very dramatic. 

We see this with the phenomenal rise of social networks. We’ve suddenly realized that we can now combine unlimited access to information with unlimited access to people. A billion of us are free to connect, create, share, or re-mix content, at little cost, across a two-way global network, according to our interests. It has become incredibly easy to from online groups - way, way easier than offline - groups that can easily function as tiny cells or as enormous groups. The participative web is here.

Communities of Practice

This ease of participation and group formation is defining how we will learn online.  Look, for example, at how Wikipedia, Linux, and the open source movement all tend to function as communities of practice.

As a matter of fact, CoPs are everywhere. One reason is because the CoP offers the people plus content combination again. A second reason is that the CoP suits the medium. Learning in a CoP is not a matter of tranference from an active teacher to a passive consumer. (A traditional student/teacher relationship would work neither socially nor pedagogically on the web.) Instead, the relationships in a CoP are egalitarian and require social capital rather than authority. It simply has to be this way with loosely affiliated groups who collaborate, not on the basis of some institutional regulations, but on the basis of a shared learning objective. 

I guess I know this from first-hand experience. ChinesePod is very much a CoP. Jenny, John, and I see ourselves more as resources and less as as the instigators or controllers of the learning. Learning there is not the result of teaching, but rather  as the result of the individual’s engagement with the resources. Our role as practitioners is therefore to demonstrate the models and propagate good learning practices -  it’s not the content alone that makes the learning happen but the society that froms around it. All of this is true to the CoP spirit. Here’s an example of how learners react (see the first paragraph).

Edublogger Steve Hargadon is rightly excited about these possibilities. In this excellent summary from last week, he identifies ten web 2.0 developments that will drive learning forward. He takes, as a starting point, the recent work of John Seely Brown (from whom I’ve also borrowed freely!) and he certainly does not underestimate the importance of collaboration.  It’s a must read. My own conclusion from it all (just to be consistent) is that it is not the knowledge or the learning per se that will bring about change, so much as the collaboration that inevitably follows. 

There will be collaboration and it will change everything.

Ken Carroll

There’s lots of start-ups in the language learning space, mostly variations on the social networking and Skype models. Most of them aren’t very good though, and many miss the point entirely. What, imho, are they doing wrong?

 Medium and message

These are early days for Learning 2.0. There’s  still an overall lack of understanding of how new media enable learning. Designing content for a podcast, cellphone, or web application is a new discipline with new challenges, but a lot of the content that I see is simply old-style content stuffed into the new channels.  (Content decisions are frequently coming from software developers, rather than teachers.) Simply putting learners in front of some content and expecting them to learn isn’t enough. You would not, for example, film a newspaper and put it on TV - the medium determines the message. In the same way, learning content has to be  created, written, and designed for the medium through which it is consumed. Too often that isn’t happening.

 You can usually spot this problem on the interface, but I also got to see it up-close when I recently visited a multi-million dollar start-up (language instruction again) and met their leadership team. The team didn’t have anyone with any real concept of how learning was to happen on the platform. The result will almost certainly be a content dump.

Misunderstanding social networks

I think there’s a lot of  confusion about the role of social networks (SNs) in learning. One common start-up approach is to simply create a SN (with random extras thrown in) and call it a language learning community. This is naieve, as quite often there’s neither a business, nor a learning case for it: SN features in and of themselves have no intrinsic value or interest. Nor do you create value for learners simply by allowing them to register and sort through random lists of people who are equally at a loss as to how to learn a language. They need more guidance than that. 

Note: I use the Facebook SN to connect with professionals in my field. It definitely has value. But Facebook is a destination site so the value is in the connections. In a language learning context, by contrast, the SN is a feature, not a destination. 

There’s another class of language instruction sites that are being called SNs but aren’t. Mango Languages offers free lessons - 100 of them translated into various languages. It’s not bad as a free resource but it’s kind of 1996 in its approach - static lessons, a closed system, highly structured and didactic, heavy on the software, etc. No idea where the SN tag comes from there, but their press release assures us that Mango is ‘quite literally opening up a world of possibilities to people worldwide’. I think that’s more naievete (and poor word chioice) than arrogance and it says something about the maturity of the genre.

Global ambitions

Another tendency I’ve seen is aiming way too wide. The hope is obviously to create VC appeal and consolidate a global market, etc. English is the obvious market, since there are millions of English learners around the world and no dominant market player. (That’s because there is no single addressable, global market for English - there are hundreds of them.) Yet even this is oftentimes not ambitious enough for some.  I’ve seen some fairly zany collections of people with the most wide ranging, if not irreconcilable, agendas in some of these places. This willingness to throw focus to the wind is evidenced in plenty of other ways, for example, the music videos, particularly when they’re not formatted for learning and could be found in dozens of other places.  

Skype - leaving it to chance

I’m seeing a lot of new Skype-based start-ups. Again, the hope is to consoildate a global audience, generate advertising, or take a cut of tuition. However, the act of connecting people is now a very easy thing to - online platforms of this sort have become commodities, so it’s hard to wring value out of it. Most see one of two options. The first is to connect teachers with learners and take a cut of the tuition. But teaching over Skype is difficult, and not terribly rewarding, even for experienced practitioners. It is and will remain a skill that is relatively scarce, and Skype doesn’t allow you to scale that up, as lessons tend to be one-on-one.  Whether you plan to make money from advertising on the platform (ouch!) or take a cut of the tuition, it will require one hell of a lot of teachers to reach any scale. 

The second option is to allow to individuals to create language exchanges, i.e. no teachers in the equation. The problem here is that there is no revenue, apart, again, from advertising. But worse still is the fact that you have  amateur teachers, with cross-cultural and language barriers to overcome, and no accountability to speak of. I’m afraid this is a case of leaving it too much to chance.

Clearly these new market entrants will mature and iterate, but we do have a ways to go at this point. But it’s also interesting that many of these iniatives are being tagged as if they were new, and original ideas. In fact, however, by September of 2005, we had put into practice all of the main ideas behind web 2.0, the social networking, and yes, even a Skype-based business model into practice.  Both ChinesePod and SpanishPod are fully-fledged communities of practice that have devloped the elements of social networking way beyond what many of the start-ups are now grappling with. I might be biased but I at least I can claim to speak from experience!

 Ken Carroll