Learning Effectiveness = Func[Individual and Network strength]

In a 2.0 world, what will constitute or determine learning effectiveness and learner engagement?

We have seen a lot of literature on the individual’s own impact on her learning, but a recent post by Tony Karrer on his Work Literacy blog struck me as profound.

So, while information is much more readily accessible and that changes some aspects of knowledge work, the bigger change is the ready access to more people and more of what they know. The key question is often “Who?” and not “What?” – yet most knowledge workers are not familiar with asking this question and finding ways to leverage collective wisdom.

Network Key Skill – More than Knowledge-able | Work Literacy

If learning effectiveness is seen as a function of network strength (defined as the quality and quantity of resources in an individual’s network that she can learn from), many new things become possible to investigate beyond simply ensuring accessibility to people and content. For example:

  • Is there a way to optimize the route to the right learning resource in much the manner that packets are routed on a physical network (can we create some algorithms such as OSPF [Open Shortest Path Forward] or BGP [Border Gateway Protocol] ?)
  • Is there a way that learning effectiveness is not constrained by capacity of learning sources? We would not want a learner with an immediate need not to be able to find a resource to learn from, would we?
  • Is there a way for us to match learning styles/preferences across resources so that learning effectiveness is maximized? By this I mean that if we postulate that our teaching style is going to be an amplification of the way we learn (our learning style), then is it possible to think of systems or attributes of the network that allow us to match styles between a source and a recipient?
  • Is there a way to reduce failed interactions by promoting nodes (in a participatory, non-exclusive fashion) that contribute or create more effective learning experiences?
  • Can bots or user agents optimize the learning effectiveness by saving human time? After all, I would hate to answer the same question 2 million times, wouldn’t I?

Can we also think of looking at how networks or formations could interact in ways that protect identity when desired? Are we talking bridges such as those between disparate networks? Maybe we could think of really evolving a folksonomy around learning formations that could help entire networks to collaborate/merge/transform?

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