Self-made learners are the future

A couple of years ago I started trying to get people to realize that training, as we knew it, had to change. There was no way, in workplaces where the technologies were changing at ever-increasing speeds and employees needed to perform work that could not be condensed to a job aid, that trainers could train people to do what they needed to do anymore. Everyone was frustrated. The employees were overwhelmed. The trainers were overwhelmed. No one was getting their development needs met. In fact, sometimes people didn't even know what those needs were.

While looking for ways to help our trainers and staff I came across some comments by Google's VP of People Operations, Laszlo Bock. He said the most important skill for today's workers was the ability to learn quickly. I was fortunate to have had a mother who was a schoolteacher and an insatiable curiosity that had led to a lifelong love of learning. I had been exploring DIY learning for years ... it seemed natural to me. But there's the rub. I came to see that many people don't know how to learn on their own. They don't know where to start or how to proceed.

That was when I started talking to people about personal learning environments and how they could start to build a support system to help them move into a new age of learning. Last year I spoke at the USDLA National Conference and told people that If You PLEs (please) You'll Thank Me Later. Among the key points were to help people start to see the whys and hows of getting started developing their PLEs.

In the coming days I will be participating in a MOOC that is trying to create a Self-Blended Learning Movement. The course description says:

Be part of the Self-Blended Learning Movement, an approach to teaching and learning that takes the best of blended learning, combines it with the best of self-directed learning, and creates a pathway to optimal authentic learning. Explore how savvy students are designing amazingly creative ways to find success in the traditional classroom through self-blending.

One of the first videos suggested as a great example of self-blended learning is Scott Young's Can you get an MIT education for $2,000? Spoiler alert: yes ... and no. His talk in no way diminishes the value of attended an institution of higher learning, but it also points out that there is a lot of learning that can and must be done outside of those hallowed halls. I too would highly recommend watching this talk.

Scott Young beautifully shows his thought process and the methodical approach he took. And that is a key point for all of us. Part of learning how to learn on our own is coming up with a deliberate and focused approach to learning. While he undertook his MIT education project as an experiment, I had to do a similar thing when I found that I did not have the funds to complete graduate school. And frankly, I was not entirely happy with the whole school experience. Sadly I found it had many of the limitations that I experienced in the workplace. I was a bit disillusioned I suppose. One of the things I didn't like in both environments was how captive my learning was. At work, my artifacts of learning were held hostage in the firm's LMS. At school, pretty much the same thing. I couldn't even interact with people taking the same course I was in another time slot. For someone who had spent years exploring the wonderful connections to be had over the Internet, I felt very restricted. So I went back to charting my own course.

The video also immediately reminded me of three books that I have read that are directly on-point with the idea of DIY learning. I'll post more about each in the coming days, but the list is Kio Stark's Don't Go Back to School in which she interviews dozens of people who took non-traditional learning paths; Blake Boles' The Art of Self-Directed Learning in which he too helps chart the uncharted approaches to learning; and Josh Kaufman's The First 20 Hours in which we get a front-row seat to his approach to learning any skill quickly.