Thinking About Workplace Literacy
As Tony and I work to pull together some thoughts and resources related to workplace literacy, we thought it might be a good idea to aggregate some of our previous posts on the topic. Below are several of my more pertinent posts, including a number I’ve written on personal learning environments (PLEs). Although they aren’t all about workplace literacy, per se, they deal with many of the issues we’re trying to explore here around using social media tools for learning, knowledge management and productivity.
- Exploring Personal Learning Environments–a whole series of posts on a variety of issues related to using Web 2. for personal learning.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 8th, 2008 at 1:17 am
Tena koe Michele
I think you summarised it well when you said in your comment to comment to Leigh “. . . I don’t think we’re at all clear about what we should be doing.â€
Isn’t that where it’s all at right now? So what’s the drive to get people to acquire skills that are newly invented, the use of which are perhaps frequently misunderstood anyway?
It has taken around 4000 years of human existence for reading and writing to get to where they’re at today. Perhaps we should first reflect on the practices associated with work literacy (never mind the digital bit) over the last hundred years or so before diving into looking at changing people’s attitude/skill/awareness on this one.
I’m all for communicating better. But frankly, isn’t there a real danger of the invention of ‘digital’ bourgeoisie - an artificial set of digital protocols and practices that is more likely to exclude than include those who are not in ‘the know’?
Surely if we truly respect the principle of good communication, we should avoid the possibility of this happening at all costs.
Ka kite
From Middle-earth
June 8th, 2008 at 9:17 am
I hear you, Ken, on not wanting to create a “digital bourgeoisie”! Actually, my thought is that if we don’t begin engaging in discussions like this about the skills that are needed and ways to develop and use those skills, we’re going to be in a world of hurt. I’m not sure that we can afford to take 100 years to figure things out.
Speaking for myself, I’m not interested in trying to dictate anything to people about what they should and shouldn’t be doing, as much as wanting to get people thinking about these ideas so that they can devise good solutions for themselves. I think we can get clearer about where we are and where we need to go by having the conversations. My worry is that we won’t do that and we’ll end up behind the 8-ball!
June 9th, 2008 at 9:55 am
I think there needs to be more of a systemic approach to “digital literacy” than Vicki Gray’s list. She is coming from a grade school environment in which digital skills must be easy to identify (so as to be accountable and “testable”). However, I think there needs to be a more abstract foundation that older users, especially, need to understand.
This is true with any ideas that are introduced after formal education (k-12) has been introduced. From my work in cross-cultural studies, I know that our ways of knowing and understanding the world are based on the epistemology developed as we develop as children. This was similar to Freire’s work on literacy in which adults needed to start with what they were familiar with to learn reading. Literacy is as much the cultural and systemic basis (and an understanding of it) as it is the decoding of words. Decoding and meaning making usually draws from personal understanding based on (adult’s) education and experience.
As we are referring to work “literacy”, therefore, I think it is important that we realize that the system within which most adults’ “learning”, “knowledge”, and meaning-making is based is on the system in which they were educated. Now we are asking them to enter a completely different system in which the skills, knowledge, and meaning making will distort what they are familiar with (only look at the differences in communication and “grammar”).
Therefore, I think there needs to be more discussion (at least embedded into training older workers) about the new “system” that is developing and will continue to develop at a fast pace. However, I think this is a hard sell for organizations.
I think also, it is important that we as trainers are able to articulate this new “system” and the impact it has on our culture and epistemology.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:57 am
Virginia, you’re absolutely right that we need to be working on understanding and articulating a new system for knowledge work and ongoing literacy as knowledge workers. That’s a key part of what we’re trying to accomplish here as we try to engage smart, thinking people like yourself in a discussion about what it means to be “literate” as a 21st century knowledge worker. I think that a lot of us are recognizing that something very different is going on now. The question becomes, how what is it exactly that’s happening, what kinds of helpful systems can we develop that will better articulate these things to people and then how can we support them in developing the knowledge and skills necessary to function well in this changed environment.
RE: Vicki Davis’s digital literacy ideas (which she’s actually adapting from another source), I think that you’re right that they may have been developed for more of a K-12 audience, but in reality, these are skills that I do think adults need to have as well. At least they give us a place to start from in having some kind of discussion about this. I also think that her list is the kind of framework that a lot of workplaces are more likely to “get” because they value “concrete” and “testable” almost as much as the K-12 system, at least in my experience.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Ken - I hear you that there is something a bit exclusionary about the way early adopters have created almost a whole new language and set of protocols around these tools. When you are outside, you feel like it’s going to be very hard to get into this club.
But, I would claim this argues for us trying to help open this stuff up to the early majority.
Not by dictating, but by suggesting what the opportunities are. Studies of PIM show that this is all highly personal (at least subjectively).
I agree with Michele (no surprise) that we really don’t have 100 years to figure this out (or even 10) to figure this stuff out. Instead, we have to figure it out on the fly in an on-going basis. Change is constant. It’s faster all the time. Saying - let’s step back and study this … I don’t think that cuts it. Especially when the stakes are pretty high.
That said - you are right that we don’t know the “right answer” … in fact, I would claim that after 4,000 years, we don’t know the “right answer” around that … after all teaching of reading and writing has changed considerably in the last 30 years (at least comparing my kids education vs. mine). So, I think we have to do the best we can.
Michele - fantastic statement of the crux of the mission here in your last comment.
June 9th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Michele and Tony: So how do we dig deeper so that we have an understanding of what is going on at the systemic level (intangible and tacit knowledge) which then is “measured” through skills and more tangible products and explicit knowledge? I know this is the million dollar question. However, I’m trying to figure out the framework for understanding the underlying structure/culture and making its basis accessible to others so there is a deeper level of learning.
I know from my own experience this semester in teaching these skills, I came up with my own understanding (although it is not “research” based on how some of the tools work and how students used them, learned from them, fit them into a larger organization, even which tools work well together and which do not. Blogging is good, but I feel like I am missing some things and almost having information overload.
I like the summary question, but I think I’d like to have a wrap-up of important issues (as you have done in the blog) somewhere where we could all contribute on the various topics (especially where there was a lot of interaction). I would also love to have a central place, like a pageflake, with all the blogs, documents, forums (if we have them in the future), chat transcripts, etc…where a person could go and see what is happening, then choose from that one central place where to go. I currently have the RSS feed on my iGoogle. But I have other things there also which distract me.
June 9th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Virginia, your million dollar question is something we’re definitely trying to learn more about here and I know that Tony has some ideas that he’ll be sharing soon on a kind of framework that could be used to think about work literacy. In the meantime, it would be great to hear more about what you learned this semester through your own experiences–is this something you’ve blogged about or would be willing to share here? I think that a lot of us are looking at our own personal experiences to get an idea of what’s happening in this arena, so the more we can share about this, the better.
Also–we’ve been suggesting that people use the “workliteracy” tag in de.licio.us to create a central place for all blogs, documents, etc. but creating a Pageflake and/or Netvibes tab isn’t a bad idea either. We’ll have to add that to the “To Do” list.
June 10th, 2008 at 5:31 am
TÄ“nÄ kÅrua
I read what you both say.
@Tony - You’ve just illustrated my point when you speak of the teaching of reading and writing in the last 30 years. In fact, what they are now discovering, particularly in the new reading programs that have developed, is that the old phonetics stuff that they chucked out 15 to 20 years or more ago is now the best thing since sliced bread and is back in vogue.
I don’t agree with the ‘moving right along’ attitude to progress for it rarely actually establishes true progress. It simply moves on to ground that’s new to some. I’m also aware that it is a postmodern trend to discard history - it’s rarely looked back on for its usefulness. Yesterday is history in some postmodern arenas.
If we were to follow what Derida was saying to its logical conclusion we would be scrapping the very idea of writing - anything. Instead, lets do the whole thing in pictures, illustrations and movies of people talking. That’s progress? Derida was a dyed-in-the-wool postmoderist.
@Michele - I never suggested we take 100 years to figure things out, nor even 10, Tony. But it can take 10 years or even 100 years for us to have a gathering of useful facts, figures and observations. Society should be just as capable of learning from its mistakes as a young pianist new to the piano. Perhaps the reason society has learnt so little from its past mistakes is because of a reluctance to stop, study and think about the implications of past mistakes in terms of what can be learnt from it. The ‘moving right along’ now-faster-than-ever attitude was used in Physics for the last 75 years while Niel Bohr’s theories and the Heizenberg Uncertainty Principle marked time as Science attempted to pursue logically related avenues. We now believe that Bohr and Heizenberg were wrong in their fundamental assumtions, but only because no-one dared to look back - for nearly a century! The silencing voice of authority.
Ka kite ano
June 10th, 2008 at 5:50 am
@Ken–I agree with you that we need to look at facts, figures, etc. and try to learn from both our past and the present.
You also bring up an interesting point about assumptions and what happens when we don’t question those. I think that’s part of what I’m wanting to explore in these discussions–what assumptions are we making that maybe we shouldn’t? How do our assumptions shape our solutions and ideas? Are there different sets of assumptions we should be looking at? This is all part of how we can learn from what’s happening.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Michele: I took your advice and blogged about the lessons learned from my class this semester.