#PKMChat 2015-03-04 Challenges of Life-Long learners

Staying current is important for knowledge Workers, digital or not.

As soon as we leave the college we face a need to catchup and stay aware of the latests developments in our domain. It’s a burden for some, a pleasure for many. Why is it that Life-long learning became a necessity: – Most of us will have different periods in our career with different focus. This means that complete sets of our Knwoledge has to be acquired during our work time. – Every change in technology or practices is now spread instantly. This means that we can’t barricate ourselves behind ignorance. Meanwhile Learning changed also and some new challenges and hurdles appeared: – Time management: Working is Learning and Learning is working. Often life long learning was a private matter, done outside of work hours. Learning now happens during operational work. This means that productivity and results could be affected in the short term. How do we make sre we are protected against such risks. There is also a risk of work invading private sphere under the cover of being continous education. Being able to set limits while taking into account that we have a long term benefit in acquiring more competencies is a challenge. – Information overload: Tons of source of information are now available for us. How are we dealing with it affect our time available to actually consume it and our ability to digest it. Free lunch can turn into indigestion or obesity. – Today learning happens socially. Being a MOOC or a Twitter Chat, a book most of the learning will come as a sde products of interactions with peers. Asking questions, forcing ourselves to answer questions we didn’t think about, reading others contributions or productions helps us deepen our understanding on the topic we just learned. For this to happen we must maintain a network. There is a pleasure in exchanging and sharing but it must be substained, regular. Attention must be allocated as well as a slot in our agenda. A network must be taken care of especially since behind twitter handles and bloggers there are humans who spent time and effort with whom we should empathize. Emotional intelligence is required and this could be a challenge by itself. – With the accelerated life cycle of Knowledge competencies must be learned and unlearned. Unlearning looks like it’s easy and effortless but retaining new stuff comes at at cost, specially if application is delayed or distant. A life long learner should have some tactics for Knowledge retention. – Tracking progress and directing ones learning is becoming a challnge by itself. Where a simple bookmark in a book was sufficient we deal now with courses residing on different devices, served by different sources or MOOCs, resonating in conversations taking place of different networks. How to track what was learned and where? The difficulty is really that the information can hardly reside in one place and it must be active to be used for measures or tasks management. How to be sure we consistently follow on what we started. – Seld Directed Learning. While Self Directed Learning and Life long learning only overlap mostlife long learning will at some point be self directed. Some services inside organization may help, some courses could include a facilitator but the trend is let learners organize themselves. However they have not been trained in analysing their Knowledge Gaps, their level of acquisition on a given matter or to judje their capabilities to lurn new stuff considering the prerequisites and time available. Starting on learning tracks that can’t be achieved, dropping out from MOOCs one after the other, being unable to setup learning paths certainly happened to some of us. This chat will run mostly in inquiring mode. The objective is first to gain a larger view of the challenges and possibly some solutions and tactics used. PKMChat being about Personal Knowledge Management encompass Knowledge lifecycle in general. Our first chat was about learning, acquiring Knowledge. Our second is about sharing it. Week after weeks we will switch from one end of the lifecycle to another while exploring all the channels that could be used: social, formal, writing, videos. Feel free to suggest topics by tweeting to @pkmchat.

. @dhinchcliffe @InFullBloomUS Really learning new skills is the only workplace skill that matters. Everything else is table stakes.

— David Brakoniecki (@dajb2) February 17, 2015