Learning by discovery

My ideas for my blog seem to come at the last minute. This week I was struggling for an idea, mostly because I was slightly distracted: checking every 5mins to see if my thesis result has been published; surfing modcloth.com (an awesome clothing website, think Zooey Deschanel); and, looking at Mac accessories to pimp out my home office. Oh yeah, and working of course. My inspiration for this blog came from a webinar I attended today that used analogies from angry birds, Farmville and Facebook to discuss performance reviews.

If I’m ever going to be accused of product worship, it’s going to be because I think Sonar6 is just awesome (they’re the guys that organized the webinar). Their product is cool and so is the way they approach performance reviews. However, its not the way they approached performance reviews that struck me, because that is already my mantra (read my other blogs).

They used a phrase, ‘learning by discovery’. I’m pretty sure they were using this term in the context of system design. Sonar6 is a performance review application that is designed in a way that training is not necessary (usually). People can discover how to use it. However, ‘learning by discovery’ has other implications for me, similar to, but outside of, the context in which Sonar6 was using it.

‘Learning by discovery’, to me, means the design of learning systems that are self-intuitive. It has much wider scope than classroom learning. It could be e-learning systems, where participants are guided through the learning experience. It could be the use of social media to gather information. It could be learning through experience. I’ve already blogged about some of the articles by Charles Jennings and the 70/20/10 model, ‘learning by discovery’ sits in the same context.

‘Learning by discovery’ is an individual and self-motivated experience. It is not as straight forward as slapping a workshop into a business to facilitate learning. It is about shaping individuals to embark on their own learning journey. It is about developing learning through an organic process. The underlying business culture needs to underpin this. This is more difficult to articulate, deliver and measure than traditional learning and development. How do we facilitate this kind of culture?

We need to think more out of the box then traditional learning and development. There is a lot of buzz about e-learning being the new fangled thing in learning design, however, ‘learning by discovery’ is such an interesting and relatively untapped avenue.