Over the Shoulder Learning

 

Nancy has a post about "Over the Shoulder Learning"

I always try and promote the people and process stuff, but the reality is that tools are often the "door opener" to the process conversations because they are more tangible. So being able to "look over the shoulder" as someone uses the tools in a social context would be really useful.

I'm thinking about what we used to call "Shoulder to shoulder" learning in the old circuit rider days.  It is informal knowledge transfer around using the tools.  So, this is the network effect of that model.   And, I wonder how that can be facilitated by the Internet and Technology .... via screencasts, something along the lines of the design of jingproject. Anyway, more to ponder here.

 

Here's a ten-minute audio of her talk from LearnOnline

• The fact is that we don't know very much, but collectively we know a lot because people have different knowledge.   There are amazing things that can happen when we look over each other's shoulders.
• There is a long tradition of over the shoulder.  "Cheating."    We are peering over our parents as they cook and we learn how cook.  We watch people and learn.
• The observation is not enough, conversation.
• Leaning over someone's shoulder to see how someone does it.  Example from Twitter.  Group based IM tool that allows you send a message to a group.  What are you doing right in 140 characters.   People thought it was trivial.  She's been watching edubloggers ask questions.  "How do I convince school leaders that I should Twitter."   Someone answered.  Put it out on a wiki and asked for stories.  Using it in ways that I had never imagined.   It changed my perception of the tool.  It balanced my interruptive nature twitter versus productive nature of the tool.
• Productive way to learn how to use tools.
• Del.icio.us - a peer way to collect information. Not one person has to do it. Looking over their shoulder around a certain topic.
• It is hard to do it by yourself.  There's so much out there.   When I look over someone's shoulder, I organize my learning.  It's the context of someone's practice that makes the light blubs go off.
• This is a great if you're face-to-face, but if you're not.  Desktop sharing in conferencing apps.
• Another way is a screencast.  There are ways that technology allows us to look over each other's shoulder
• Formal ways include a peer assist.  A formal way to for others to help you.  These are done mostly face-to-face, but can be done online.
• Blogging.  Graham Wenger put it up - blogging allows to share what we're doing and allows us to look over each other's shoulders.  Connect with people who can advance our learning.
• Benefits for the person looking and be observed.
• Her dream: unconference.  What we had unconference with over your shoulder and worked in pairs.  Can you imagine the density of learning.

Comments

[Michele Martin]

It's funny that you're posting about this now, Beth--I was just thinking the other day that it would be a really cool project to have people record screencasts of how they use their PLEs, similar to Jane Knight's recent gathering of the Top 100 e-Learning Tools. Different people could give us a guided tour of how they use their favorite tools--maybe have a time limit or something that forces people to really focus. Then gather them in one place--this is actually part of what I was thinking about in terms of helping nonprofits adopt social media. If they could see individuals using the tools for their individual work and how it helps them, might speed the process.