Tracking …

How do we know if learning has taken place, and if it is of value?   The more I think about it, the more it strikes me that

1.  You have to start by tracking what actually happened – basic epiricism.

2. You have to give the learner an opportunity to give ‘voice’ to their own account of what happened, without first constructing a maze of questions, categories, potential statistical or qualitative analyses for the learner to battle through.  So start with a simple tracking account – ask the learner what happened. 

3. You can then start looking at the different affordances that were created, discovered, exploited.  Its spans a huge range, of people, places, technologies, connections.   But maybe the affordance is simply: an opportunity for Roy to find another way to talk about ‘affordances’ (technology buffets… see below).

Here’s an example.  Its my own (brief) account of how I engaged with the Global JAM that Knowledge in the Public Interest ran recently.   

  Its called ‘Roy’s Tale’ …

How did I go about this?

This is the first draft of my own narrative of my involvement in the JAM.  It might serve as an exemplar, or spark some ideas as to how people could write their own narratives and trackings of their own involvement.  It is useful to me because I am starting a research project into how people use resources (media and humans) to create their own affordances for learning.  Just seeing whether I could write this narrative, and seeing whether it started to take on a useful ‘form’ is certainly enough for me to feed into my research on learning, even though the tracking tools I will be using there are a little different.  You will see that write an account and reflect on it at the same time – that’s just the way I write. 

This is the first draft of my narrative … 

0. How did I get here?

I have been part of a European Conference on Knowledge Management for some time.  In 2006 I went to the conference in Budapest, and met Diana and Susan from Knowledge in the Public Interest.  At the conference dinner on the Danube we spoke some more, and started to exchange notes and resources.  That got me connected to the JAM in the first place.

1. Signed on for the jam, as a facilitator 

2. Comfortable that I could manage my different roles as facilitator/ expert/ participant

(wrong: it was far more complicated than that for me, although some people, seemed to have done this with alacrity and ease)

3. Found the pre-jam discussions interesting

• Later, in retrospect, wondered whether the organisers should have used this session to edit the formulation of the questions, or sharpen them up a bit, rather than set them up before the discussion started as a given.
• Question: if you are a facilitator, do you need to have some input into the tasks you are going to facilitate, or can you just facilitate someone ‘else’s’ tasks?  On the other hand, the Jam was, legitimately, a knowledge-gathering exercise by a very specific group, who wanted to get something very specific out of it: specific advice, or at least frameworks for advice, for practical tasks. 
• Still cant decide one way or the other on this one yet: it could go either way. 

4. At the start of the jam, found myself getting straight into the debate, particularly the question of whether we should be looking for technologies or for affordances. 

5.  Referenced and linked to a number of social software network nodes:

• Parts of my own blogs and wikis
• Contributions I had made to other people’s wikis
• Useful collaborative sites (visualcomplexity.com)
• Started harvesting links into a repository/ jotter that I use, called Star Tree Studios.

6. Started writing new headings for posts (as did other people), to put more ‘sign-posting’ into the long scroll of the discussions. 

7.  Much later, connected up with a useful line of thought, brought in by Nancy, which eventually morphed into a very useful (if wordy) knowledge ‘chunk’:

Technology Buffets for Supporting Interesting Practices

It needs quite a bit of work, but the basics are there, in plain English.  ‘Affordances’, much as its dear to my theoretical heart, is a non-starter for general conversation

8. Started linking back into other network nodes:

• My own blogs and wikis
• A new wiki (to capture and organise outputs of the JAM)
• Comments on other people’s comments on yet other people’s blogs (my comment on Dave Pollard’s blog, on a post of Dave’s that Nancy commented on in the JAM), which I also posted to a blog of my own.

9. Put some of my own frustration at the discomfort of reading and scrolling through soooooo much stuff into a rather fanciful proposal to write a new software platform for Jamming, called: “new JAM-jars”.   

10. Emailed Diana and Laren on setting up a discussion and wiki, post-JAM, and this wiki is the result.