Digital Public Space

Andrew Hiskens

Personal learning in organized complexity: navigating the digital public space

Like any well-occupied public space in the real world, such as a city, the digital public space exhibits all of the characteristics of organized complexity – the dynamic inter-relationships of systems, of processes, of emergent self-organization.

And like cities, there are those who want to bulldoze the complexity and everyday messiness, and replace it with something new and slick and with nice clean lines. As Jane Jacobs, the author, urban theorist and activist once memorably noted:

‘The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.’ (Jacobs, J. (2000). The death and life of great American cities. London: Pimlico. p284.)

You see this tendency in the online world, often disguised as ‘doing good’. A proposal to filter the entire web coming into Australia to keep us safe from child pornography and terrorism was only rejected relatively recently. And, in schools in particular, the ‘digital school fence’, cutting off access to social media and a host of other things which could genuinely support learning is commonplace.

But the truth is that, if you want people to learn road sense, it is better for them to experience crossing the road than remain safely indoors. And the same is true of the digital public space.

Over the past several years, the State Library of Victoria has run an online professional development program for teachers and school library staff called the Personal Learning Network or PLN. The genesis for the program was a wonderful model created in 2006 by Helene Blowers called 23 Things, which we adapted as a platform for shared social learning around technology in education.

In part this was designed to counteract the received wisdom that students – Prensky’s ‘digital natives’ – were uniformly great at technology and that teachers all needed remedial classes. The reality is that teachers are experts in learning and, given the opportunity, most will model how to be good online learners for their students. We also wanted to do something which didn’t focus on the early adopters often targeted by tech companies for their special programs, but on the group in the middle of the bell curve who are typically time poor and just a little anxious about technology.

The beginners’ program covers – getting started, organising information, building networks, teaching and learning tools, making the most of resources, changing practice in a digital environment and the future of learning. The course structure is constantly changing, as we reconsider options from beginner to advanced, and specialized programs on topics dear to libraries such as research skills.

The program not only exposes people to a range of technologies from social media to research tools, but it has purposefully utilized quite different delivery platforms, ranging from a Wordpress blog, to Lore and Edmodo. Choosing the right tool from a large and constantly changing pool of options is also part of the learning; it is learning how to navigate the digital public space in action.

The results have been phenomenal. We surveyed participants in late 2012 against a set of characteristics based on people’s best learning experiences and found:

90% had a sense of having learned
88% felt that there was an audience for their learning
95% felt supported
83% felt that it was social
We were also interested in people’s experience of flow and found that 81% found the program ‘tough’ and only 4% ‘too tough’
23% felt ‘a bit’ of personal progression, 14% ‘quite a bit’, 27% ‘a lot’ and 32% ‘heaps’
55% were ‘excited’ and 18% ‘passionate’ about the program
93% said they would recommend it to colleagues.

This was an older cohort – 63% had been working in education for more than 15 years. And that made it all the more remarkable that, when asked how the PLN affected their professional practice, 21% said it changed it a little, 50% said it changed it somewhat, and 19% said it changed their practice completely. For a group who had been in the workforce that long, that 19% is a remarkable result.

We have had a new community develop each year the program has run. One year people will flock around Facebook, another rally around Twitter, or Diigo, or a range of other options. It’s messy, there are multiple channels and there is no ‘neat and tidy’. If you give people their head to explore the digital public space, you will see organized complexity and the creation of emergent value.

As one participant described the program:

‘Brilliant. Comprehensive and fun. I am now in contact with educators from all around the world.’

You can’t simply build communities, but you can help people work out how to connect.

Andrew Hiskens
Manager, Learning Services
State Library of Victoria
Australia

Email ahiskens@slv.vic.gov.au

Twitter @ahiskens