Collaboration vs Destination

Dan Pontefract makes an interesting point in his post about the standalone LMS being dead:

But … to change the culture, you also need to drive an organization to believe that training does not only happen in an event (ILT and eLearning) and thus, by keeping the standalone LMS alive and kicking, you exacerbate the issue.Employees need to constantly connect, they need to constantly share, and they need to learn from one another. This cannot happen solely in an ILT class and it surely does not happen in an eLearning module.

Set up your ‘Facebook for the organization’ by embedding an LMS (or LMS like features) into your enterprise-wide collaboration platform. Coaches, mentors, online buddies need to coexist within the wiki’s, blogs, discussion forums, webcam meetings, online presence, etc. which needs to coexist within the list of formal classroom and eLearning offerings which needs to coexist with your documents, knowledge management, videos, podcasts, which needs to coexist with the profiles, skills, and recent activity-feed happenings of all employees.

Making learning something “special”, rather than something natural and transparent is at the heart of many issues instructors and “the academy” seems to be dealing with. People can spot (and hence avoid) “learning” activities from across the institution. Making learning occur as part of the normal process of interacting with people and data should be a model we try to roll out for learners in and past their teens.

The real power of the social network learning idea is that the learning objects and objectives are all tied to the situation that the learner finds themselves in. This doesn’t mean that one doesn’t need to think about including some manner of structure or “guide on the side” to ensure that interactions don’t start feeding on poor data and interactions. But when good materials go in, you’ll more than likely have good material come out on the other side.