Sun, Elite, and the future

College kids are different these days. Awash in multiple distractions, most have the attention spans of gnats. They lack the discipline to put in the hard work to learn things the way you and I did when we were in school. Ye Gods, most of them don’t read email any more, much less books. They live in the fast lane, skittering across the top of important issues without ever getting to the heart of the matter. And before you know it, they will graduate and become employees of our companies.

Learning professionals know that the incoming generation is not going to put up with what has passed for corporate training since the 70s. I asked a newly minted college grad what she thought of eLearning. Her reply: “Sucks.” Why? It’s too one-way, there’s too little choice, it’s so…. structured. Entering the workforce, she plans to vote with her feet. If the ladder to corporate success requires enduring traditional, ho-hum, take-it-or-leave-it training, she’ll work somewhere else. Corporations that don’t offer employees the freedom to learn with others will end up with the dregs, not the top talent, and will fail to survive as a result.

At the CLO Symposium, Karie Willyerd showed samples of how Sun Microsystems is preparing to greet the workforce of 2020. This is a group that learns from nano-nuggets. Sun is constructing a platform that makes the nuggets available; you can mine for them however you choose. The magic of Sun’s approach is that it accelerates informal learning. Performance is what matters, not how you learned to perform. (Check this out.)

The next morning, Jonny Parkes of The Irish Learning Alliance shared a vision of Elite, a learning platform where the semantic web, social learning, and communities of practice converge. Once again, the approach was to build the sandbox, not to pin down what people do with it.

Not only are Sun and ILA developing the sort of learning environments that I expect to dominate the future, they are laying the groundwork for something much larger: the true integration of learning and work.

Throughout the CLO Symposium, people grappled with ways to explain the value of learning to business leaders. Perhaps that makes sense if both parties think work and learning are different things. That’s no longer the case.

In a knowledge society, work and learning are the same thing. Sun and ILA are developing what I call learnscapes. A learnscape is the platform where knowledge workers collaborate, solve problems, converse, share ideas, brainstorm, conceptualize, tell stories, help one another, teach, keep up to date, forge partnerships, build communities, and distribute information. Learnscapes are where and how modern work is performed – including workplace learning.

Back to those Twittering, Facebooking, always-on college students. Our challenge is not to design overlays and alternatives to accommodate them. Instead, we should be developing ways for them to take advantage of their approaches to the world to make our businesses more effective.

While we’re at it, we’ve got to drop the us-versus-them stance. They’re adept at keeping up with torrents of information, volatile situations, extreme flexibility, and real-time responsiveness. The oldsters are not.

We have to stop thinking that we’re creating learnscapes for them. What we’re really doing is building networks to help us all work more effectively. Yeah, they’re different. But so is the world we live in.

<span style=”background-color: rgb(255, 255, 0);”>The issue learning professionals need to address is not how to talk with business people; it’s how to be business people.</span> We used to tell people how to do things. From here on, we have to help them figure out how to do things for themselves.

Tagged as: learnscaping