I have been thinking about how to better define Learning 2.0 and, as usual, have found my inspiration in the writings of Peter Drucker.

In an essay on “The New Productivity Challenge,” published originally in 1985 in the Harvard Business review, Drucker rights about how continuous learning must drive productivity increases in the 21st century. Interestingly he defines learning as teaching: “Knowledge workers learn the most when they teach….We often hear that every enterprise has to become a learning institution. It must become a teaching institution as well.”

Brilliant. This completely brings together one of the paradoxes of the learning 2.0 world. Learners must learn to teach and teachers must learn to learn. Why is this so? One of the big new assumptions under Learning 2.0 is that everyone is an expert. Innovation and productivity are more likely to emerge as people all through the enterprise find small ways to make things better and then teach one another what they know. The Learning 2.0 model uses very simple tools that allow anyone to teach (blogs, wikis and podcasts) and smart filters so that the right information is flowing to the right people. This highly distributed model has been very successfully on the public internet with blogs as publishing devices, aggregators as personal filters, and things the iTunes podcast store as user-driven directories.

I had coffee recently with Dan Segal who had attended one of my talks. He pointed out that the message of the talk was learner as teacher and that it resonated with him because he had used this model to help people learn to do complex kayaking rolls and maneuvers. He helped me see the idea of learner and teacher and teacher as learner. It is so simple and so right. It was great to then later find Peter Drucker laying it all out 20 years ago.

This very simple but powerful idea also helped me to cystalize what I see as the service that the Otter Group can provide its customers. We have added a new mission statement that says, “Teaching people how to learn.” What that means in practice is teaching learners how to teach and teaching teachers how to learn. And our learning directors are skilled in doing just that.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2006 at 10:51 am and is filed under Learning Directors, Innovation. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.