agile learning

At the beginning of the 20th century, most people lived as if it were the middle ages. Almost half of the US population was employed in agriculture. Life expectancy was less than 50 years. Indoor plumbing was rare, as was telephone use. There were very few cars and no airplanes.

An interesting thought as part of the whole agile thing, is about how competitive advantage will increasingly come from not only being able to make an informed prognosis of the future, but an informed prediction of the present. Much market intelligence, and even important indicators such as retail sales data, are published weeks after the events on which they are reporting on have taken place.

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?

I resist requests to pin down Agile Learning with a tight definition. I see it as a family of approaches, and when you've seen a few of these approaches perhaps you start to detect the family resemblances, and spot more distant relatives. Sure, the approaches share some things in common. The main thing, I think, is that they offer a response to the unprecedented circumstances we find ourselves in now, characterised by enormous richness of learning resources and tools, combined with harsh austerity in financial (and thus human) resources. I also happen to think that a degree of self-organising by learners is a promising path to take.