One of the things that Tony and I are working on right now is a way to provide some “over-the-shoulder” learning using technology. This is a concept I first encountered in a formal way through Nancy White, but it’s clearly a process that has been around for centuries. Essentially we’re talking about getting coaching and feedback as we move through a particular process. It’s also about making a process more transparent and visible, so that new learners can see how “experts” go about performing that task.

In that vein, I ran across this post on Catalytic Conversations where an English professor records podcasts of her reviews of student papers. As she reads the paper, she talks her way through it, describing her impressions, ideas for feedback, etc. She then returns the audio, along with written comments, to her students who then use that make revisions. The response, not surprisingly, has been very positive:

According to her, the students flipped. They loved having this mobile, in-depth feedback. She loved literally being able to talk her students through her impressions. They told her they often began their rewrites immediately, listening to the recording on their iPod as they worked on the paper at the coffee house. “It was like having you over my shoulder the whole time,” one student told her. They reported how much more personal the feedback felt – and how it seemed so much more encouraging.

This is a strategy that could be employed pretty easily in the workplace as well. Managers could review a report and record their ideas and impressions as they read through it. I’d guess that many managers would prefer to be able to talk their way through a report, rather than providing written comments.

Screencasts are another way in which I think we could do more over-the-shoulder learning. Here what I’d love to see is more people sharing their processes for doing things like using their feed readers effectively or gathering information for a blog post, similar to what I tried to do here.  This has the added benefit of providing a library of learning objects that could be used by others in order to develop new ideas and strategies for accomplishing key tasks.

Social media tools are well-suited to this kind of informal learning. We just have to start thinking creatively. How else could we use technology to support over-the-shoulder learning? What other kinds of processes and activities would be good candidates for this?

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