The Myth of Learning in India

Update (Aug 6): IIT Roorkee has decided to re-admit the expelled students, on certain conditions.They have taken a lenient view, considered the situation again and accounted for the impact of the expulsion on the students' future. #inanity-of-it-all IIT Roorkee, a premier engineering institute of India, recently expelled several first year students for not meeting the...

A school without textbooks

Not without books. Books are great. I mean textbooks as they are academi-factured (if that can be a word to denote academic manufacturing) and used now. The written word that becomes the gospel truth for 250 million students and millions of teachers in school today in India. Seriously, the textbooks we produce are perhaps the...

Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers, Gladwell's 2008 book (and I have not read his earlier work yet), is something that I started on yesterday. It has caught my attention from page one.  Gladwell wants us to ...appreciate the idea that values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who...

Network based Training (NBTs)

I have written earlier about what I am proposing as the evolution from the CBT and WBT - the NBT or Network based training, for some time now. NBTs provide a framework for organizations who want to adopt Web 2.0 and networked learning (the connectivism way) in their systems. The main components of the NBT...

CCK08 – Learning formations for this course

In a previous article, I had discussed the juxtaposition of Bruce Tuckman's five stages of group formation and evolution on the characteristics of 2.0 learning formations. I think it is relevant, in Week 1, for me to try and assess how we are as a formation in terms of: the stages (forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning),...

Instructional Design – Under Siege?

When I think of the term under siege, it reminds me of Steven Seagal, a master chef, on board a US Navy battleship taken over by terrorists in the 1992 movie by the same name. Of course, he fights back and defeats the terrorists. Doubtless somewhat of a stretch of imagination here and completely unrelated,...

X.Os in Learning and Technology

There have been some huge developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially those around the internet and the way we learn. The “X” in “X.O” represents “fault lines” or tensions between local and global, groups and networks, structure and chaos, homogeneity and diversity, teacher-led vs facilitated and simple vs complex. With each tension comes...

Network of Practice

I came across an interesting set of concepts that quite predate the Learning 2.0 proclamation. Building upon Lave and Wenger's communities of practice, Brown and Duguid developed the concept of Network of Practice. Ranging from communities of practice to electronic or virtual communities, and differentiated from formal work teams, it focuses on how individuals come together...

The new age of innovation

The book by the same name written by C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan has much to offer us in the learning industry. There is a fundamental transformation in the way we do business and it is critical for companies to negotiate two fundamental pillars of this change - co-created experiences and access (rather than ownership)...

Part 4: Learning 2.0 Formal Methodologies

Discussion Thread: This post << Part 3 << Part 2 << Part 1 Before we go on to start detailing formal methodologies, we must make concrete the business case, context and critical success factors for these methodologies. As organizations struggle to understand how they can leverage Learning 2.0 and vendors bring in their own interpretations...