Its really a great thing to analyze and understand the mental process on learning. You’ve just very well explained what we are all trying to tell everyone around in our workplaces and how it will impact employees and bring in value. Speaking about double-loop learning – connectivism – complexity is way too complex and even i had to re-read the post and related links several times to figure this out. I think the issue that often happens in our domain and probably in others is that theory always seems to justify itself and feels great when read. When you get down to the nitty gritties of implementation, its another ball game all together and thats when you need specifics.

The one way I figured out would work, is to be an instructional designer and know your audience. Define the solution using terms and examples they already understand. Again, what I just said may sound like theory, but thats the least i did and it worked. I just managed to tell our manager that we need to work on sharing knowledge with the team using our tools like wiki, forums etc. I made it sound like it was something that was available and we’re not making sufficient use of. They have accepted to try out what I said on one of our product teams as a prototype. I;m not saying that I’m done, but I’ve managed to get a ‘yes you can try’ from management. I still have unanswered questions though which i listed out in my blog. http://road-to-learning.blogspot.com/2009/05/social-learning-adoption.html

So i think the key is, no matter how deeply you understand the concept, when you want to sell it, it works better if you don’t make it sound like a big new thing and use words that people understand. Thankfully, social learning uses tools that people are familiar with in general but probably can’t imagine “making connections, seeing patterns, reflecting…”. But given a chance, they will involuntarily undergo this mental process purely out of intuition.

I am hoping i understood all the facts in your post well enough. Please let me know otherwise.

Thanks so much for sharing this. It helped me understand the process much better.

Sreya

I’d like to offer a more hopeful prognosis, along the lines of: “what we’ve found is that by inspiring people with visions, empowering them with tools and supporting their processes, leads to better outcomes in these uncertain areas that trying to train…” and so on.

It’s clearly something we’re still wrestling with!