A vision of peer-to-peer learning in organisations, interview with @olliegardener and London meet-up

Posted by David Jennings on November 26, 2010 · 2 Comments 

Here’s the intro of an extended interview I did with Olaug Nørsterud Gardener a few weeks ago. Ollie describes the thinking behind NoddlePod, her company’s first offering for making work-based learning more relevant and useful. Ollie is in London on 15 December, and we’re aiming to run a meet-up to talk more about the principles of peer-to-peer learning in organisations — please sign up at http://www.meetup.com/School-of-Everything/calendar/15538517/

Clipped from alchemi.co.uk

Ollie Nørsterud Gardener: an entrepreneur’s vision of peer-to-peer learning in organisations

Can social networks be environments for real learning? What would happen if you tried to mash up social networking and knowledge management with a human-centred approach to how people learn and develop in organisations?

Up until now, the interviews that I’ve been doing under the Agile Learning banner have been outside my “home territory” of workplace learning supported by technology. There were a couple of reasons for that, but this interview with Olaug (Ollie) Nørsterud Gardener brings it all back home with an account of a start-up technology that uses the connection-centric focus, familiar from social networking, to help people share material that’s relevant to what they’re doing at any moment.

Ollie is co-founder of the Oslo-based NoddleSoft. Their first offering, as a start-up company, is a platform called NoddlePod, offered on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model with a monthly subscription. One of the things that really got me interested was the thinking and attitude behind NoddlePod. As Ollie put it in her blog last month, ‘I just simply don’t believe that people can “be developed”.’ So goodbye to that what an old colleague used to call the sheep-dip approach to Human Resource Development, where everyone gets to jump through similar hoops or gets similar stuff thrown at them.

Noddlesoft’s approach assumes that learners want to find things out. It helps them do this by sharing resources and connecting with each other. Even if learners are undertaking the same range of activities — Ollie uses the example of corporate Graduate Programmes — this approach opens out a space for participants to self-organise. They bring their own motivation to bear, based on the challenges in the context they share, and what they learn is then more salient and meaningful than if it were just fed to them in some abstract or remote setting.

Are you in or near London on 15th December? Ollie is going to be in town again then, and we’re considering inviting her to one of our weekly learning discussions in the Royal Festival Hall. With it being close to Christmas, we’re not sure whether people will have other things on their minds. So, if we’re pledging to run this discussion with Ollie only if at least ten people register to attend. Please do this here if you’d like to talk more with Ollie. Read more at alchemi.co.uk

 

Filed under Corporate · Tagged with enterprise learning, learning, organisations, people, start-up, work-based learning