Top 10 Tools for Learning: Is Workplace Learning Really Still 1.0?

A fascinating debate has developed around Jane Hart's Top 100 Tools for Learning: The Bamboo Project has responded with a commentary called Looks Like Workplace Learning is Still Web 1.0.

First of all I want to congratulate Jane on the effort she has put in to creating this fantastic resource for learning professionals. Her analysis provides a useful overview of the 'state of the art' in tool use in the learning industry and I would suggest highlights the different, maybe even contrasting demands of workplace learning and learning in formal institutions.

Moreover, Jane has provoked a lively conversation about the two approaches taken by commercial organisations and educational/academic institutions; it's not often that we hear people post phrases like "I'm... frankly bothered" (Michele Martin at The Bamboo Project) in the 'learning professions blogosphere' - maybe not often enough.

I've reproduced the two lists of Top Ten Tools (see Table 1) from C4PT for comparison here.

Table 1 Side-by-side comparison of Top Ten Tools

For workplace learning	For formal education
1. PowerPoint	1. YouTube
2. Audacity	2. flickr
3. Articulate	3. PowerPoint
4. Moodle	4. Wikispaces
5. Snagit	5. Slideshare
6. Captivate	6. Voicethread (Free version I'm guessing)
7. Slideshare	7. Audacity
8. Word	8. Moodle
9. Flash	9. Ning
10. Camtasia	10. Jing

The debate that these lists have provoked can be summarised in these key points:

• Workplaces still use a predominantly Learning 1.0 paradigm
• Jane Hart asserts that her analysis demonstrates that

[content] is formal, traditional (Learning 1.0) approaches (i.e. content-based courses, tutorials, etc).

• This manifests itself through what Michele Martin calls the use of a

"push" mode of learning, pushing content to learners, and are focused on creating more structured, formal learning experiences.

This leads to a more "solitary" learning experience for users in the workplace environment. At an organisational level she maintains, this approach reinforces the notion that this is an objective activity imposed upon passive users, rather than a process of active, ongoing engagement that learners have in terms of their personal development and the knowledge and skills enhancement of their colleagues and organisation.

Interestingly Jane notes that workplace learning professionals, while focusing heavily on commercial tools for the development of formal learning solutions - "seem to be using free tools for their [...] personal use."

Educators and academic institutions,

on the other hand, are making use of more Web 2.0 tools, like YouTube, Flickr, Wikispaces, Ning and Voicethread, all of which invite commenting, content co-creation and interactivity.

• By "embracing" Web 2.0 tools, institution-based educators are "creat[ing] more social, collaborative and informal approaches to learning."

What a great discussion!
Before commenting on any of the above, I have to declare an interest in that I am a workplace learning professional, but I have just completed an MSc in Education & Technology and am familiar (as of 2007) with the use of learning technologies and tools in third level institutions. I also contributed to the C4PT survey in March 2008, and my Top Ten list is a 60:40 split between commercial and open source tools: I use both.

In my view, the debate that I have just briefly summarised represents a number of talking points in the learning community:

1. The differing demands of workplace and formal institution-based learning
2. The resources available to commercial and academic organisations
3. Learners' needs in the workplace and in formal learning institutions
4. Personal philosophy applied to learning

1. The differing demands of workplace and formal institution-based learning

Upon reviewing the two lists, the first thing that struck me was the broad equivalency of functionality across the tools represented in the lists (see Table 2):

Table 2 Equivalency among tools

For workplace learning	For formal education
Audacity -	Audacity
Moodle -	Moodle
Slideshare –	Slideshare
Techsmith Camtasia -	Techsmith Jing (a time-limited and feature "lite" version of Camtasia)
Articulate/Captivate	- Voicethread
Both sets of tools enable the facility to share slideshows through audio, images, videos, or text with others online. Voicethread Free enables a degree of limited commenting.
Articulate/Captivate -	YouTube
Both sets of tools enable the facility to share slideshows through audio, images, videos, or text with others online.

That leaves us with Word, Flash, Ning, Wikispaces, Flickr. Back to these later.

Now read on...

Based on the evidence that 75% of the tools in the two categories enable learning professionals to undertake the same activities, but using different technologies (or in the case of tools like Jing, the same technology, just a "lite" version of a commercially available tool), we can say that learning professionals have more in common than they have separating them.

In this context, the development of training programmes and learning initiatives using commercially available (can I say 'industrial strength'?) authoring tools enables learning professionals to deliver content (hosted on an LMS like Moodle for example) to learners in an efficient and effective manner. Based upon my own experience and the observations of others in this field, I would assert that while there is a element of organisational "push" in delivering content to workers, once learners are aware that content is available for them asynchronously, they will integrate these resources into their own personal development patterns.

From the learning professional's perspective, tools like Flash, Captivate, and Articulate have a number of advantages: they are mature, stable products. They enable the development of content across a range of pedagogical methodologies and production processes. Product licensing ensures that learning and support resources are available if needed.

Similarly, organisations require that content be stored on a LMS/LCMS platform, which means that the content must be interoperable with other learning resources, which means that content adheres to learning specifications like SCORM and AICC. Open source products may or may not adhere to these specifications as closely as commercial products. Certainly platforms like Ning, Wikispaces and Flickr do not meet these requirements; what's interesting is that Moodle does, and it is represented in both Top Ten lists (actually higher in the workplace list). Moodle supports blogs, wikis, and discussion forums - all the aspects of a social-constructivist approach to learning. Again from experience I know that these functions are used in the workplace to support learning as well as to enable workers to interact with each other, share knowledge and develop skills. The popularity of Moodle in both lists also suggests to me is that learning professionals in both camps (as it were) desire a stable, integrated platform to host their learning programmes.

Both Michele and Jane are powerful advocates for lifelong learning using social media tools. However, the reality of the commercial environment is that organisations develop products using proprietary technologies, processes and knowledge. Working in such an environment I will tell you straight that there is no way on God's green earth that I would publish corporate learning content, demos or courseware on anything as unsecure as Ning, YouTube, Flickr or Wikispaces where competitors could, by accident or design, access such content. As an alternative, such materials, as well as blogging, knowledge-sharing and social interaction activities take place 'behind the firewall' using tools like Moodle, SharePoint, Lotus Notes or equivalent enterprise solutions. The reality is that commercial organisations charge customers for learning resources and they are not going to sacrifice being an 'earning organisation' to become a purely 'learning organisation.'

As this is the case, I have to dispute the position that social, collaborative and informal approaches to learning only take place in more academic environments; I would certainly say that such activities are more visible and accessible.

2. The resources available to commercial and academic organisations

Another key differentiator between the commercial and academic environments is that broadly speaking, commercial organisations tend to have more resources (i.e. in-house expertise, large ICT departments, money) at their disposal. Certainly if a company has enough employees to merit implementing network-based learning solutions, they can afford to licence enterprise-level solutions that integrate with their HRM and/or CRM solutions. I would suggest that these systems would not necessarily be in the list of nominations submitted by workplace-based learning professionals in the C4PT survey. I know that when I submitted my top ten, I was conscious of the fact that not everyone reading the list would have access to some of the tools I could have mentioned, so in some cases I omitted choices that would have been there in other circumstances. So, for example, I chose to include Audacity rather than SoundForge - both do the same job equally effectively, but the former is open source while the latter will set you back about $300.

3. Learners' needs in the workplace and in formal learning institutions

The learning needs of knowledge workers are different to those of students in formal learning institutions. Knowledge workers' roles and responsibilities direct the way they plan their activities, execute their tasks, and how they reflect upon their actions once tasks (or components of larger-scale tasks) are complete. Further, knowledge workers (unlike academics, for example) are typically required to apply their skill- and experience assets in real-world situations which exhibit degrees of uncertainty about both the situation itself and the desired outcomes. Much of the real-world job of the knowledge worker is more concerned with problem setting, then problem solving. To move from a problematic situation to an actual problem, the practitioner must “frame the problem: …determine the features to which they will attend, the order they will attempt to impose on the situation, the directions in which they will try to change it. In this process, they identify both the ends to be sought and the means to be employed” (Argyris, C. and Schön, D., Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness 1974, p.165). This requirement plays a role in how learning professionals strategise and implement learning solutions for knowledge workers.

Learners in formal learning institutions acquire knowledge for different purposes and in a different way. The purpose of studying and learning in an academic environment is to explore current knowledge, to research, to explore, to be involved in discursive activities. The goal requires either using a different set of learning methodologies and approaches, and commensurately a different set of tools and technologies, or using the same tools in a different way. I think that both options are represented on the Top Ten List: I have illustrated the equivalencies in the toolset above. But given the purpose of learning in this environment, we can say that there are good reasons why tools including Ning and Wikispaces are represented on the formal educational institution list, as these tools facilitate the types of discourse I have just described.

4. Personal philosophy applied to learning

This category is perhaps the most interesting of all: for this is the heart of the debate. And I chose the word "heart" deliberately. I think that it's fair to say that most people involved in learning care passionately about communicating ideas, concepts, knowledge to others.

What is important is that so many people care enough about how we mediate knowledge and ideas to be motivated spend time and effort to discuss this topic in this forum. In my view, that is the most positive outcome of using these technologies to share ideas.

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