percolab’s New Years meeting in London, UK with kindred spirit, Pamela McLean of Dadamac was a rich one. It’s always reassuring to encounter another organisation striving for “a new normal” in learning systems. We quickly established many obvious points of commonality: systems thinking, reflective practice, lifelong learning, informal learning, peer based credentials, and the potential of the digital world and of course, the big C word, collaboration. Pamela and I are both designers and facilitators of learning within a 21st century learning paradigm.
Pamela adds a key point. She says, prior to the agrarian revolution, people couldn’t have imagined what life would be like, post agrarian revolution and same goes for the industrial revolution and that today we sit on the cusp of a yet to be named revolution, that we struggle to envision clearly, but that needs to be addressed and talked about in learning programs so that we can collectively begin to make sense of it. She call today’s transition period “streams of change”. Pam, has developed some visual tools to support conversations on this topic. Here’s one that she was kind enough to share with us:
This resonates, of course with percolab who is all about getting beyond old top down, prescriptive, bureaucratic modes, supporting the emergeance of the “new normal”. The question is how much do we need to address this paradigm shift and sense-making of the world, explicitly and directly within the work we do?
And with this open question we launch into 2012.
