I am partner of a firm working in the OL field in New Zealand (face
south at the bottom of Australia and jump down and right) - we operate a
consultancy, a hyper active r & d facility and have recently hatched
an independent not-for-profit entity called the Organisational Learning
Foundation of NZ (or more informally The Learning Tree).
The challenge we have set ourselves with The Learning Tree is to
create a world class foundation for people understanding and
establishing learning organisations and learning communities in New
Zealand.
A couple of questions we are currently pursuing in the context of The
Learning Tree which may be of interest to this list are:
1 - How can we participate in a global conversation about what is emerging
in the field we have begun to call "Collaborative Learning" (due to the
inherent limitations in the term organisation when applied to communities
or societies)?
Our question has come out what we perceive as a need for some kind of
global network that can ensure useful information is quickly disseminated
between local networking centres. On the basis that we don't know of
anything that fits this description at present we would like to establish
one or more vehicles for ongoing exchanges between people involved in
similar endeavours to The Learning Tree. If you are involved in such an
enterprise and would value the creation of such a comunications
infrastructure please make contact... mark@winwin.iconz.co.nz
2 - How can we create a high leverage space in our workplaces and lives
for collectively and practically engaging in the questions that are most
vital for us and our organisations/communities and societies?
In order to work further with this question we want to create a
network of "peer learning partnerships" which would mean
facilitating the development of small groups of learners around
questions of vital importance to the participants - wherein the
participants commit to a peer based contract of creative action and
reflection in relation to the question/s that bring them together.
For example a question might be "how best can the Internet be
employed to facilitate collaborative learning?" The idea is that
people working in organisations who find this an important enough
question to explore and experiment with would be able to explore what
this question really means together on-line, conduct seperate or
somewhat co-ordinated experiments, share experiences and reflect
together on further questions raised.
To help tie all of the above together we thought it might help to
have a "storyteller" for each partnership who can help to co-ordinate
the recording and organisation of what emerges so that it (or portions of
it) might become available to others in a published form, if
appropriate. For some groups storytelling might be a hat that is
exchanged between partners...
At the moment the above concept is still a twinkle in our eyes but if
you would like more information please let me know via
mark@winwin.iconz.co.nz. I hope that this is not construed as
advertising...
My personal philosophy of learning is that
- learning is an end in itself rather than solely a means to the
acquisition of knowledge
- that we live in a universe that is itself learning (see the Creative Cosmos
by Ernst Laszlo)
- and that if learning is to be truly successful it implies creative
action aligned to the wellbeing of the whole.
If you've read this far thanks for bearing with me - I'm not usually
to big on introductions but it was fun to take the opportunity...
From: "Mark F" <mark@winwin.iconz.co.nz>