There is a focus today on the tools that technology brings to us. Name them social networks, curations tools and the like. But in learning , people are the next big app!
From data to skills and expertise : the “cognitive jumps”
When we first meet data, it doesn’t have any special meaning. We need mental models to make sense of it. These are built with our experiences, interactions with our fellow humans. Learning is never filling an empty brain with new data. It is already a reconstruction. This reconstruction connects the data to memories or explanations given by others (colleagues, family, …) or by ourselves (in action learning session for instance). From data to skills acquisition, you always need human interaction.
“Sharing is the new learning”
Alexandre Magno loves that slogan (“How Do Creative Workers Learn”). He is right. Sharing means extracting the data in order to present it to others, hence clarifying (orrdering, simplifying, finding examples, connecting to information already known, etc.) it to make it more understandable. Sharing makes us work the raw material that data is. We get more aware of it in the process.
Turning data into gold: the learning transmutation
In this digital age, you access tremendous amounts of data. And we can turn it into gold (aka skills and expertise) by sharing it through social networks and learn from the feed-backs of our peers. We have another asset for this transmutation : Agile methods. Call it SCRUM, Xtreme programming, DevOps, all these methods come with the same logic when people talk together, they are smarter to solve problems, learn from each other and improve theirs skills.
Digital needs more human interaction than ever!