Learning is a Community Experience.

Abstract

Perhaps it is obvious - you do not learn alone, but you do take responsibility for your own education. Part of that responsibility is fulfilled by your creating or finding affinity groups - the collection of places or people that provide a motivating context in which you can learn. Your choice of affinity group reflects the social and experiential nature of the learning process. What interaction style suits you best - push or pull? What timeframe provides the best retention - preparing forward or just-in-time, on-the-job? Much learning takes place on-the-job, but is retained by taking that experience and storing it as part of a more general knowledge base--the set of enduring principles that allows you to succeed in new situations, using new technologies or applying old ones. The enduring principles of object technology are often lost in the battle over programming language, engineering methodology, or architectural preference. The need to be an expert in transient technology creates an atmosphere of immediate training rather than long-term education, and often creates practitioners crippled by the currency of their expertise. But the lessons learned from the introduction and use of object technology highlight the need to foster a community of learners who help one another develop themselves as practitioners while they develop the practice itself. This paper is a story about how we might experience learning in the near future, and the role of computers in that experience - not as computer-assisted instruction, but as communications-assisted learning. The story is based on my own history as a promulgator of object technology, and what I think I learned about education from that adventure. Many of us enjoy the learning experience I describe, and so the story is told to encourage wider spread inclusion of supportive learning experience as a regular part of our professional community building. In telling the story, I will share with you a little of my own activities in developing learning as supported by communications within a community context.