From my experience, one of the biggest gaps to be minded on the journey toward sustaining innovation in technology mediated learning is the one found between education and business.
Today, we are as likely to describe learning using terms such as “competitive advantage” and “strategic imperative” as we are by such terms as “cognitive capacity” and “modality preference.” While psychologists, teachers, and trainers continue to view learning as a change in human capability, businesspeople recognize that learning products and solutions represents new commercial opportunity. By actively seeking innovative strategies and tactics for realizing new value from and for learning, the business community has created a new awareness of what learning can mean for individuals, organizations, communities, and societies.
It seems self-evident that academic and business stakeholders would want to collaborate in the process of evaluating theories and principles to provide algorithms and heuristics for creating new commercial value from learning. However, the reality of such collaborations is usually far less satisfying than the expectation. Learning professionals and businesspeople often discover that they hold completely divergent views on the role, purpose, and value of learning. They find that the unique perspective each brings to the conversation can result in very different interpretations of what is actually being said. Despite our best intentions, learning professionals and businesspeople interested in creating new value from learning often find themselves at cross-purposes.
It seems to boil down to a basic difference in what is valued: the role of an academic expert is to explore and research constructs of a discipline with the intention of finding new ideas and contributing new knowledge to the field. In business, the point is to provide value to customers that is important enough for them to give you money for the products, solutions and services to secure access to that value.
Creating tangible, commercial value from learning is a very different proposition than codifying theories and practices of teaching, learning, and human performance improvement to preserve and promote our learning culture. Being responsible for codifying the body of knowledge related to learning
means never questioning the value of learning, because that value is absolute. The study of learning and the ensuing codification of knowledge represent value in and of themselves. Business opportunities that arise from learning aren’t the point. On the other hand, business stakeholders of learning are more concerned with pushing the boundaries of the possibilities of learning than they are with maintaining the status quo. Furthermore, their intent in pushing those boundaries has everything to do with cultivating new commercial opportunities rather than creating new knowledge for knowledge’s sake. The more that education stakeholders of learning call for methodological rigor, the more resistant and irrelevant they appear to business stakeholders, especially when commercial possibilities seem so obvious. Conversely, business stakeholders’ fascination with determining new ways of leveraging the commercial value of learning smacks of opportunism when viewed through the eyes of academic stakeholders, who have dedicated their careers to learning about learning simply because they believe it is the right thing to do (and because they want to be credited with new ideas that emerge from those explorations.)
Lest you think that I am being a bit melodramatic about this "separate silos" situation, let me offer a concrete example. Let us consider EDUCAUSE, the higher education IT organization. During the past several years when I worked for commercial software companies I was not allowed to submit a presentation proposal for consideration for the annual meeting program. Being a vendor, I couldn't be trusted not to slip in commercial references, or to pitch my wares. Around the office we used to ruefully laugh about being treated like "vendor slime". On a personal note my relationship with this organization is stellar, but it makes me kind of cranky to know that as a vendor I am a second class citizen in this world.
Unless we appreciate the factors that shape the role and importance of learning from the perspective of each stakeholder group, the value that learning holds for one is increasingly irrelevant to the other. Rather than learning from one another, we work only with those who think as we do. The more we find ourselves inhabiting separate conceptual silos, the greater is the risk that we may stop trying to learn from one another altogether. These days, with resources being cut and with common wisdom underscoring that we will not survive if we continue to do business as usual, we simply can't afford to NOT mind this particular gap.
Today, we are as likely to describe learning using terms such as “competitive advantage” and “strategic imperative” as we are by such terms as “cognitive capacity” and “modality preference.” While psychologists, teachers, and trainers continue to view learning as a change in human capability, businesspeople recognize that learning products and solutions represents new commercial opportunity. By actively seeking innovative strategies and tactics for realizing new value from and for learning, the business community has created a new awareness of what learning can mean for individuals, organizations, communities, and societies.
It seems self-evident that academic and business stakeholders would want to collaborate in the process of evaluating theories and principles to provide algorithms and heuristics for creating new commercial value from learning. However, the reality of such collaborations is usually far less satisfying than the expectation. Learning professionals and businesspeople often discover that they hold completely divergent views on the role, purpose, and value of learning. They find that the unique perspective each brings to the conversation can result in very different interpretations of what is actually being said. Despite our best intentions, learning professionals and businesspeople interested in creating new value from learning often find themselves at cross-purposes.
It seems to boil down to a basic difference in what is valued: the role of an academic expert is to explore and research constructs of a discipline with the intention of finding new ideas and contributing new knowledge to the field. In business, the point is to provide value to customers that is important enough for them to give you money for the products, solutions and services to secure access to that value.
Creating tangible, commercial value from learning is a very different proposition than codifying theories and practices of teaching, learning, and human performance improvement to preserve and promote our learning culture. Being responsible for codifying the body of knowledge related to learning
means never questioning the value of learning, because that value is absolute. The study of learning and the ensuing codification of knowledge represent value in and of themselves. Business opportunities that arise from learning aren’t the point. On the other hand, business stakeholders of learning are more concerned with pushing the boundaries of the possibilities of learning than they are with maintaining the status quo. Furthermore, their intent in pushing those boundaries has everything to do with cultivating new commercial opportunities rather than creating new knowledge for knowledge’s sake. The more that education stakeholders of learning call for methodological rigor, the more resistant and irrelevant they appear to business stakeholders, especially when commercial possibilities seem so obvious. Conversely, business stakeholders’ fascination with determining new ways of leveraging the commercial value of learning smacks of opportunism when viewed through the eyes of academic stakeholders, who have dedicated their careers to learning about learning simply because they believe it is the right thing to do (and because they want to be credited with new ideas that emerge from those explorations.)
Lest you think that I am being a bit melodramatic about this "separate silos" situation, let me offer a concrete example. Let us consider EDUCAUSE, the higher education IT organization. During the past several years when I worked for commercial software companies I was not allowed to submit a presentation proposal for consideration for the annual meeting program. Being a vendor, I couldn't be trusted not to slip in commercial references, or to pitch my wares. Around the office we used to ruefully laugh about being treated like "vendor slime". On a personal note my relationship with this organization is stellar, but it makes me kind of cranky to know that as a vendor I am a second class citizen in this world.
Unless we appreciate the factors that shape the role and importance of learning from the perspective of each stakeholder group, the value that learning holds for one is increasingly irrelevant to the other. Rather than learning from one another, we work only with those who think as we do. The more we find ourselves inhabiting separate conceptual silos, the greater is the risk that we may stop trying to learn from one another altogether. These days, with resources being cut and with common wisdom underscoring that we will not survive if we continue to do business as usual, we simply can't afford to NOT mind this particular gap.
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