The future of learning is DIY

If someone asks me what’s the best learning management system, my initial response is – Google. Donald Clark describes the top five global brands (Google, Apple, YouTube, Wikipedia, Starbucks) from the perspective of learning, with this comment:

Could it be that powerful, everyday “e-learning” has crept up on the world, separate from all the academic and institutional noise, and in a consumerist fashion?

All of these brands enable informal learning, grassroots knowledge management or collaboration on a local or global scale.

With Google you can find most information that you need. YouTube is a quick and easy way to get “learning objects” to the world. Apple gives the essential tools for knowledge workers, and in a nice package. Wikipedia has shown that the wisdom of crowds is just as good as the wisdom of elites. Starbucks gives free-agents and road warriors a place to meet and work. These top brands provide the equivalent of the interstate highway system for the creative age.

Enabling DIY (do-it-yourself) on the Web appears to be a good business model. Even on the fringes, such as wi-fi from a café. This is the power of informal learning, if organisations decide to enable it. It has to be DIY, user-driven and uncontrolled. People will figure out what’s best for them, as they have for millennia.

If you’re in the learning business, don’t try to build another LMS or portal. Instead, figure out ways that enable DIY. Believe it or not, learners can, and will, do the rest. They already are.

* Content from jarche.com is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Share Alike License

15 thoughts on “The future of learning is DIY”

You mean “The Google”, don’t you, Harold??

No os asusta la dependencia de algunas herramientas para el desarrollo global del conocimiento?.
Me he permitido dirigiros a un post de mi blog, en el que cuento la fÃ¡bula del caballo poliploide de Gregory Bateson.
Saludos

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The mass customization of learning, work and life ??

Could it be that powerful, everyday â€˜e-learningâ€™ has crept up on the world, separate from all the academic and institutional noise, and in a consumerist fashion?

Yes.

STARBUCKS!??
DAMN.
Isn’t that one of those silly cafe places with the crazy coffees and all the people with those portable computer things open just taking up space for paying customers?
I’m no luddite, I’ve was in one of those ‘cafe’ places before, I saw all those cancer causing tv screens those kids carry around. I tried to look over the shoulder of one or two of them but they got all upset. Turns out the owner of this cafe place just gives away those internet radio waves to anybody that wants them. Now how is anybody supposed to make any money if they’re just giving it away? What kind of economee is that?