Many forces are acting to change what we call learning. The biggest is undoubtedly the internet: e-learning, blended learning, social media, web 2.0 tools, etc. In the post-network society (and a billion people connected) technology is the driver, the enabler, of rapid, widescale, distributed change, including a change to how we learn (perhaps ChinesePod is an example).

But there’s more to this than just the tech. Making the tech work is one part of the challenge. Tech puts the e in e-learning, but it doesn’t mean that learning will happen just because you have new tools and a nice website. The new tpes of learning (e-learning, mobile learning, etc) don’t work in the same ways that other channels do, so we have tyo try to understand them and ensure also that we don’t forget the learning part of e-learning.

If we want to leverage the new learning medium we need principles or pedagogies to understand it, to describe what it can or cannot do. Hopefully we’ve uncovered a few of those ourselves at ChinesePod, but there’s tons more we need to learn.

Two concepts stand out to me as tremendously relevant to what we’re doing:

• Informal learning: People like Jay Cross have opened our eyes to new ways to think about/define learning.
• Communities of Practice: Understanding how networks and groups trigger learning through social contact.

I’ll try to explore both these areas in future posts and figure out how we can leverage them at Praxis. I’ll try to explain how brining these forces together will effect new levels of interactivity, information sharing, problem-solving, etc, in how we work and learn. These issues almost define on-the-job-learning, so I hope to explore that, too.

Ken Carroll