At ASTD TechKnowledge^®, ASTD will kick off a grand experiment in informal, web-based learning. ASTD and Internet Time Group will begin hosting the workshop on Learning with Blogs, Wikis, and Web 2.0.

Join us, and you will see that we practice what we preach. All sessions are online. Coaches and mentors replace traditional instructors. Our subject matter is flexible. Hands-on works; if you join us, you will learn by doing.

Throughout the month of February, you will participate in 90-minute webinars and group discussions at noon EST, starting Tuesday, February 6. You'll join a five-member learning team and jointly explore tools and applications on the web.

You'll be encouraged to apply your discoveries to a real project. You'll build a network of learning peers. And you'll join an ongoing community of people who are interested in informal learning and web 2.0. This is not your typical in-and-out workshop. In fact, we think of the overall experience as an unworkshop because most of your learning takes place outside of the webinars.

ASTD TechKnowledge^® will afford an opportunity to kick the tires and assess whether this is for you. At 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, February 1, we will host an information meeting with our coaching team. Bring your questions.

Target audience

The February "Unworkshop" is designed for learning professionals who are web novices. (Past workshops taught us that it's not a good idea to mix power-users with web newbies.)

A web novice is someone not yet comfortable with the web. This person may have surfed the web, commented on blogs, and stored photographs. It's hard for anyone to avoid the web these days. But a novice is unlikely to write a blog, set up a wiki, record podcasts, or publish a website. A novice fears getting lost among all the sites on the web. You're no longer a novice when you have the confidence to find your way and make some changes on the web. You get to decide whether or not you're a novice.

A learning professional is someone who understands how people learn. A learning pro has learned that learning involves a lot more than pouring content into heads. The real deal is an interaction between what's incoming and what's already there. Learning is rewiring the brain by sculpting new pigeonholes and adding connections. It relies more on demonstration than on telling. And unless it's soon applied, what's learned is soon forgotten. There are many paths to gaining this knowledge. As with the web category, you get to decide whether or not you're a learning pro.

There's one additional requirement: You must be excited about doing something like this. If you tell yourself "I'll never get this," you won't. If expanding your capabilities to include web-based learning excites you, this is for you.

Outcomes

The February activities aren’t designed to show you the location of today’s hot websites or the current set of web tools. Those will all change in the next few months. We address the underlying processes, not today’s products. You will learn to find things and solve problems for yourself. You learn when to use a wiki, not the mechanics of Socialtext 2.0. Our content emerges from the interaction between participants and subjects. We care less about what you learn than about what you become.

Our goal is to have you say: "I know how to spot opportunities for web-supported learning and the confidence to propose web solutions."

Stepping stones on the way to the overall goal are

·       becoming proficient in finding and trying out web applications.

·       getting the big picture of bottom-up informal learning

·       understanding the role of blogs, wikis, podcasts, tags, RSS in learning

·       relating the best web-solution to a given learning need

·       participating and learning from an online community.

Next

If you're attending ASTD TechKnowledge^® in Las Vegas, come to our session Thursday, 4:00 p.m.

Find out more about the ASTD workshop and our other unworkshops by visiting us at unworkshops.com.

The next article in this series will describe how to build a learning ecology on the web.