Robin_HoyleAs the plum pudding grew cold and the Turkey moved from leftovers to lodger, I used to use the annual Christmas holidays to reflect on the passing years.  My ruminations would eventually result in a blog about what was going to happen in the world of L&D over the next 12 months.

A couple of years ago I gave up.  Not because the predictions I made were so wrong – in truth it was a mixture, some spot on, others a good distance wide of the mark.

I gave up my annual sooth saying because the things I was predicting were pretty similar year after year. The next big thing was coming; it was just taking its own time about it.

So in 2010 I advocated more mobile learning. In 2009, I wrote about games and ‘gamification’. Although fewer experts think we are going to locate all our training in Second Life, I still see that badges and league tables are encouraging some to think that the future of learning is game-based.

Also in 2010, I talked about ‘social media being recognised as more complicated than putting a facebook logo on your LMS’ and in 2011 I revisited this and said I was still waiting for social media to fulfil its role and take its place as part of the learning process in organisations.  In 2015, Twitter is the top learning and performance tools for the sixth year running and yet I’m still waiting for the benefits of social media in learning to be realised.

(Twitter’s elevated status is interesting.  An excellent piece of research with 5700 learners by Towards Maturity, found that only 6% of new starters use Twitter as a learning tool.  When they looked at line managers, the number halved to only 3%.  So how come Twitter is the Top Learning and Performance Technology tool and has been since 2009?  I think this is another example of L&D people talking to each other rather than discussing things with the wider business they serve.  If we want to be more relevant to the strategic direction of your organisation we need to make sure that we talk to someone other than the people in L&D.)

In every year I posted my New Year wish list/predictions, I anticipated much less focus on the classroom and a shift towards more work-based learning. I foresaw increased access to online resources, colleagues and managers who had committed to developing their people. I’m still waiting!

So, asking me to chair the Future of Learning forum at World of Learning 2015 may seem a bit of a risk.  I am, after all, on the cynical end of the spectrum of enthusiasm about what’s new and what’s not.

One area which tickles my interest is the area of informal learning – how organisations can enable people to learn with purpose beyond the formal round of classroom workshops and online modules.  I believe it simply can’t be left to chance.  Learning and Development teams have a role in creating the conditions in which people learn informally and continually.  I know this is hardly new, but then not everything needs to be.

My model for informal learning is a continuum, the first three stages of which have been the way humanity has learned since we first walked upright on the savannah.

Stage 1: Observation  – watch someone do something, identify what works for them and…

Stage 2: Imitation – copy what they do to see if it works for you too, and

Stage 3: Experience – the stage when you perform the task repeatedly and either receive feedback from someone else or seek to improve by comparing outcomes and working out the approach that works best in different circumstances.

This is all well and good but recent news about intelligent machines being able to learn from experience suggests that this is no longer an exclusively human quality.  If your ability or need to learn stops at the experience stage, this might indicate that your job may soon be filled by a robot!

The good news is that the final two stages of my informal learning continuum are not easily replicated by a machine.

Stage 4 – Innovation – novel ways of doing things may not be new to the world, just new to you or your team/organisation.  But building beyond the way you have been shown to do something to create a new approach, process or practice is an incredible learning experience.  It is when we widen our understanding and apply principles of which we were barely aware. Once we have created a new way of doing something we reinforce our learning by…

Stage 5: Articulation – this is hardly new.  One of the mainstays of constructivism is that people learn when they try to explain something they barely understand.  Explaining what you’re are doing and why to someone else is a significant learning activity in itself – regardless of whether the person that you’re are telling gains much of use. If you’ve ever used the term “I’m just thinking out loud here…” you’ve engaged in the articulation stage of the informal learning journey.

If my earlier predictions are correct and workplace learning will continue to relocate to the workplace from the confines of the classroom, we need new and interesting ways of taking people through these five stages.

  1. much more leisure time or
  2. a dystopian future which makes Mad Max look like a documentary

(delete as per your own views about the benign nature of your fellow humans)

In any event, if you share my interest in what the future might hold,  I hope you can join me when I introduce Perry Timms of PHTR , Andy Lancaster of the CIPD, and Kristofor Swanson of JPMorgan to discuss the Future of Learning at the World of Learning fringe session on Wednesday 30th September at the NEC, Birmingham.

The session will be a discussion and if you’d like to suggest a question for the panel, please join in straight away by commenting here.

Robin Hoyle’s books:

Informal Learning in Organizations

Complete Training