Kyle Mathews :: Dreams With In

1. Schools exist to prepare students to thrive in the environment where they live.
2. The environment we live in has changed significantly in the past fifty years from a mechanistic to an electronic world.

I've been reading and thinking a lot lately about how to drive more adoption of the social learning platform I'm building here at BYU, https://island.byu.edu, and wanted to summarize some of the highlights of what I've learned. All of the patterns come directly from Ross Mayfield and Michael Idinopulos's writings so a big shout out to the great work they're doing at Socialtext.

Pattern 1: Launch Broad then Deep

University learning is centered on the course. A pattern for learning familiar to any current or past student. Students and teacher meet 1-3 times per week for 8-12 weeks. There's lectures, readings, papers, projects, quizzes, and tests.

This, by and large, is an adequate pattern for many learning purposes. But no rational person would suggest this is the only workable solution or even what's best, or adequate, for all purposes.

Michael Idinopolus wrote an intriguing post over on his excellent blog yesterday titled "Enterprise 2.0: Skip the Pilot."

I thought I'd repeat some of his arguments because it agrees nicely with an argument I've been formulating lately regarding deployment strategy for social learning software within higher education.

But first to his article:

Wow, what a great conference. And talk about intimidation. I had a mild to strong case at different times of Chris Lott's imposter syndrome. So many brilliant thinkers. But I'm definitely glad I made the effort to go as I learned a great deal. Many of my assumptions were confirmed and many gaps in my understanding were exposed. So an excellent time of growth and learning.

The following is a few of the thoughts I had during the conference.

[This is the proposal I'm making for the creation of a new course at BYU.]

Here's a great quote from a journal article I'm reading for class. The article nails the problem with most social media / knowledge management installations in organizations.

A book I read recently helped me finger out why school can be so irritating at times.

The book is entitled Weird Ideas that Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation. One of its "weird ideas" is that companies should hire slow learners. Not stupid people but slow learners of the organization's code. A code is, the author explains, "a company's 'knowledge and faiths,' its history, memories, procedures, precedents, rules, and all those taken-for-granted, and often unspoken, assumptions about why things are supposed to be done in certain ways."

He goes on to say that most companies hire "fast learners" who quickly learn to do things the "right way" and see things much as others do in the company. But companies that do innovative work need a different kind of worker, one who won't get "brainwashed into thinking just like everyone else. They need people who avoid, ignore, or reject 'the heat of the herd. . .'"

This was a comment I left on Jon Mott's blog post, Getting From Here to There. Jon is an Academic Technology Strategist here at BYU who shares my enthusiasm for using web2.0 tools in the classroom.

I think a critical tool to have in building and proselytizing learning 2.0 tools is a key metric. This metric would be used to guide building decisions and to measure success.

Researchers have shown that the distribution of many natural and social phenomenons follow what's called the power law. Power laws are known by other names such as the 20-80 rule (80% of wealth is controlled by 20% of the population), the long tail, Winner-Take-All, etc.

Here is an example power law graph from Wikipedia: