Professional Development

In the 21st century, working environments are evolving into collaborative places where knowledge is disseminated by autonomous individuals organized into more lateral and less hierarchical structures [17].

The key idea is that having all members working together to craft a shared understanding of what we are working toward and what our expectations are for student results will make everyone feel like they are on equal ground. When a lateral structure is encouraged, this supports knowledge groups where employees truly work together and depend on each other [1, 17]. Thus, stakeholders will be more likely to believe in the vision and mission and try to make it work and establish a community where it will work.

My aim, though, was to put the students in conversation with many voices, not only mine.

Rarely examined in the literature are the tensions between centralised decision-making versus a highly individualized faculty culture of teaching in higher education which have direct effects on the deployment and opportunities for innovation and sustainability.

past efforts to incorporate more significant changes in teaching have been more focused on the technology than the appropriateness for learning

In rich learning environments, student choices to explore, socialize, collaborate, and contribute create a more decentralised context for course content.

While acknowledging the importance of Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy, Fink (2003) suggests a new taxonomy that goes beyond Bloom’s cognitive hierarchical learning levels.  The categories of Fink’s learning taxonomy are “relational and interactive” rather than mandated successive levels and address the following categories of learning: foundational knowledge, application, integration, human dimension, caring, and learning how to learn (Fink, 2003, p. 32). Constituent categories are interrelated as “achieving any one kind of learning simultaneously enhances the possibility of achieving the other kinds of learning as well” (Fink, 2003, p. 32).  In contrast to Bloom (1956), Fink (2003) moves instruction from teacher-centered to learning-centered

learning is inherent in all human activities. All of us are learning all of the time. We can't help it.

In the social model, learning is driven by the community of people who actually do the daily work. It is generated by the requirements of the work, rather than determined by abstract standards of what people ought to know.

In a fundamental way, all work is about learning: it is about learning to fit in and to collaborate, about learning to take initiative when appropriate, it is about really understanding customers, about acquiring intimate knowledge of the products and services the company sells and how they can fit into customers' lives. Acknowledged as such or not, learning has to be an integral part of work. But, somehow, integrated [work+learning] activities have become split into the separate spheres of [work] and  [training] which have come to be dominated by quite different interests.

an absorption or integration cost is the cost of change management, such as unanticipated costs associated with the technology, like the cost of providing tutoring support to learners (which is a cost that most organizations do not consider when deciding to launch an e-learning effort) or that, despite the fact that staff can access the learning anywhere at any time, if the work environment does not support transferring the learning to the job, learners will not become more productive.

Many of my expectations for 2010 are around informal learning initiated by the learner. But it's not just informal learning; formal learning will have its place for more in-depth content. Sometimes learning departments will choose face-to-face instruction because of team building or the nature of the content. Blended learning is still the favored approach making sure you choose the appropriate mode for different parts of the learning experience.

Templates are fine, but they’re based on practiced routines rather than solving problems.  This is OK when getting started, but practiced routines can be constricting because the focus is on conforming to the routine rather than solving the problem.

Ideally, the course is less about the information and more about how the learner uses the information

A teacher/instructor/professor obviously plays numerous roles in a traditional classroom: role model, encourager, supporter, guide, synthesizer

This model works well when we can centralize both the content (curriculum) and the teacher. The model falls apart when we distribute content and extend the activities of the teacher to include multiple educator inputs and peer-driven learning. Simply: social and technological networks subvert the classroom-based role of the teacher.

Networks thin classroom walls. Experts are no longer “out there” or “over there”.

In this issue, however, the expression “distributed learning environments” means something entirely different. Here we mean that the learning environments are distributed.