Friday, April 08, 2011

Slow Learning

Clark Quinn has been talking up the concept of “slow learning.”

I love this concept.

He’s expounded on it a bit in his newest book Designing mLearning.

“Recognizing that natural learning is not an event, but a process that develops over time, the question is whether we can take a slower, more thorough approach to developing learners.”

“As a metaphor, think of drip irrigation versus the typical watering paradigm, a flooding. Instead of a massive dump of information that will evaporate, how about just a little bit at a time, reinforced (spaced learning, as above). You can do this unintelligently, like drip irrigation, but you can do more.”


So with the tools you have now, what can you be doing to design for slow learning?

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Quinn, Clark M., Designing mLearning: Tapping into the Mobile Revolution for Organizational Performance, Pfeiffer (San Francisco), 2011. p. 190-191

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I have been a big advocate of slow learning, that is if you want something to stick!

Brent MacKinnon...... said...

It astounds me how little I know about something after pouring myself into it for the past 10 years. With social media and social learning, I just discovered the assumptions and expectations I had, didn't make sense. That said, I realize that I had to wander around in the dark to finally get a better set of assumptions, definitions and expectations. No one is keeping score or track of this process except yourself, so it's best not to be judging your learning speed at all - what a pile of head trash!

Slow learning is just fine. The tools make everything look like you should be going at the speed of light with your learning but the reality at least for me is little bits of learning over time combined with great leaps of awareness is more the norm. Thanks for adding to my slow learning process Cammy.
Brent