Emergent Learning: What the Dean Campaign Can Teach us about Online learning
What the Dean Campaign Can Teach Us
about Online Learning
By Kathleen Gilroy, CEO, The Otter Group
Howard Dean's use of the Internet has catapulted him into the top ranks
of the Democratic candidates for President. While it is not clear that
the governor of Vermont will ultimately prevail in the 2004 Democratic
presidential primary and caucuses and become the party nominee, the
Dean campaign's use of the Internet has been extraordinarily successful
at creating a high performance learning community. And there are
enormous lessons to be learned here for designers of e-learning
programs for corporations and universities.
The strategy of the Dean campaign is called “emergent” because it draws
its power up from the grassroots. Dean online followers collaborate on
organizing and perfecting the campaign, their ideas trickling up from
the bottom rather than being superimposed from national headquarters.
Emergence is the term coined by author Steven Johnson, whose 2001 book
on the subject described self-organizing intelligent systems of slime
molds, ant colonies, and cities. Johnson's principles are the
philosophical basis of the Dean campaign site. According to Johnson,
“Dean is a system running for President.”
What follows are a set of principles working to great effect for Dean,
which we think can be adapted to online learning programs with equally
powerful results.
The Social Network
First and foremost is the value of the social network. According to Joe
Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, “The Internet puts back into the
campaign what TV took out — people.” Dean has become a front-runner by
building a social network on the Internet. As in the analogy with TV in
political campaigns, people have also been missing from the majority of
online learning programs. Most programs consist of individuals
interacting (or better transacting) with static content. The absence of
meaningful connections with other people in online learning programs
accounts for their massive (60 to 70 percent) attrition rates. For
online learning programs to succeed, like the Dean campaign, they need
to put people at the center of their learning model.
In the Dean campaign, people type in a zipcode and find each other. In
a learning network, rich databases can enable learners to make
connections with other people, their contacts, and their ideas.
Learning, particularly in the context of the professional workplace
where our programs are run, is often about identifying the right person
as teacher. To address this problem, at The Otter Group we are starting
to incorporate social networking applications into our learning
platform so that our learners can tap into one another's contacts and
expertise. We always build in synchronous sessions for learners to work
together online. And we are incorporating instant messaging and
presence awareness into our newest learning models.
Feedback and Pattern Recognition
The Dean campaign web site is awash in data. The site features key
metrics about the people participating in campaign: the number of
identified supporters for Dean; the number of meet-ups (locally
organized Dean campaign events); the number of contributors and how
much they have given to the campaign; the number of letters written to
voters in rural Iowa; the number of emails received by the campaign;
the number of Blog entries posted and comments posted in response. Data
collection and display are critical features of emergent systems.
Deanspace - the term coined for the campaign website - is not really
about Dean. It's about the people working in the campaign.
Data collection and pattern recognition can also be successfully
integrated into online learning programs. One of the big problems in
online programs is that people do not have palpable sense of others in
the community. Virtual learning disconnects people from a shared
context. But the Internet is particularly well structured to counteract
this problem. It is basically a database with communications tools that
makes it easy to collect information about the learning community and
make it available.
In a program that the Otter Group has designed on conflict resolution,
we have collected profiles on the participant's conflict styles and
merged them with survey data we collected about how people are
experiencing conflict in the workplace. Combining the profile and
survey data with detailed personal examples demonstrates for
participants that their peers with very different profiles are
addressing similar problems to their own and that sometimes one
approach is more effective than another. This reinforces in the
strongest way possible the core lesson of the class: that it is
possible to consciously choose a strategic approach to dealing with
conflict.
All kinds of data can be collected and shared: solutions to problems;
opinions about current issues facing the learning community; patterns
of work processes; feedback about tactics and methods. An emergent view
of a learning community would, like Deanspace, make visible critical
information about the community's goals, needs, and expertise.
The Big Blog
The central intelligence of the Dean campaign is the “Official Blog.”
It is a journal of activity within the campaign. The blog reports,
editorializes, hustles, and cheerleads its readers. Campaign managers
post entries daily, which are read and commented upon by thousands of
Dean supporters (and critics). Each entry contains multiple links to
other sources of news and commentary. One of the Blog's innovations is
its listing of other blogs linking to it. While some of these links are
“official,” (Veterans for Dean, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders
for Dean), most are not endorsed by the campaign (Cyclists for Dean,
Lawrence Lessig). By including unedited comments on its site and
listing unofficial, independent links and blogs, the campaign makes its
diversity and range visible.
We believe that blogging can be used in online learning programs. It is
a terrific format for keeping virtual learners informed about what is
going on in the community. A blog (authored by the faculty or learning
managers) can be the central intelligence of the learning experience.
It can be the history and repository of knowledge - anyone who reads it
should be able to quickly learn what is going on. For programs that
incorporate independent or team projects, blogs can be used by project
managers and teams to keep track of their own progress, keep one
another informed, keep faculty and executive sponsors informed, and to
make connections to one another's work. Once a history has been
developed, blogs can reference past experience and knowledge.
The blog can also serve to better integrate course materials into the
discussion flow of a course. Blog entries can easily include links to
web-based materials, enabling students to quickly and easily reference
specific clips from videotaped lectures or excerpts from readings in
the context of an ongoing discussion. This overcomes the restrictions
of a linear-organized syllabus.
At a technical level, blogs generate XML files based on a standard
protocol called RSS (short for Really Simple Syndication), which allow
them to be tracked and indexed. When new entries are posted, they
generate meta-information, which can be ranked and referenced. Indexes
like Blogdex and Technorati track inbound and outbound links to blogs
and scan weblogs for quoted articles, ranking them according to the
number of references. This meta-information can be used to understand
how people in the learning community are connecting to one another and
their ideas.
Emergent Learning Communities
No matter what you think of his politics - or the ultimate success or
failure of his national campaign - Dean's Internet strategy has
converted his followers from a mailing list into a high performance
learning community. The key elements of Deanspace - activating a social
network, displaying feedback and pattern recognition, and constructing
a multi-limbed blog can be used in the design and development of
“emergent” learning programs to achieve comparable results.
Kathleen Gilroy is the CEO of the
Otter Group, an e-learning company in Cambridge, Massachusetts that
designs and manages high performance learning communities and programs.
Copyright © 2003, The Otter Group
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