Observations from the Unconference: Near Future of Learning in Australia

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the inaugral LearningCafe Unconference last Thursday. I hadn’t been to an unconference before, and was looking forward to some serious debate and critical thinking about some important issues facing our practice. Unfortunately I did miss the final 2 hours of the program, and so I did not hear the synthesis session.

Jeevan Joshi from KnowledgeWorking, and the other organisers did a good job preparing the conference by blogging topics which ultimately form the unconference output. The day was not expensive (another plus) and there were many experienced, deep thinking and credible presenters and participants at the conference.

What was disappointing (and I appreciate this has been acknowledged by the organising committee) was that the collaborative discussions were only 20 minutes long. Each were facilitated, and I only went to 3 of the 20 streams. For my streams, by the time the facilitator introduced the topic and gave us their opinion about it (which I didn’t expect at an unconference), 10 minutes had passed. Each topic was accompanied by about 4-6 deep questions. Twenty minutes was hardily long enough for 1 question. The lack of time seemed to encourage a whole lot of motherhood statements that were not explored to uncover the ‘why’.

A speaker raised the issue of needing to develop the skills of critical thinking in our organisations. We cannot expect critical thinking of the topics raised at each stream in 20 minutes. Perhaps next unconference the stream sessions could be 50 minutes for 1 question with 10 minutes to share the synthesis of the discussion with the rest of the audience. (I must say, the main reason why I am pursuing the completion of my EdD is to develop my skill in critical thinking – I appreciate it is an acquired skill).

I listened to a few of the 10 minute ‘soap box’ in the open session, and I thought this was a good initiative. It helped to make real the issues, as speakers were talking from a case study perspective, and illustrated the diversity of organisational milieu.

Organisational learning milieu is diverse

As an observer, I did notice 2 anomalies:

1. There were 16 stream facilitators, and only two were women. I’m not use to seeing this skewed representation of women in learning professional gatherings. I wondered why this was so?

2. The facilitators and audience was strongly represented by the learning fraternity of financial services organisations (i.e. banks). I appreciate fnancial services have been leaders in evolving learning practice for a long time, often out of legislative necessity (e.g. the early adoption of e-learning). However, while such learning ‘mature’ organisations perhaps have the luxury to critically evaluate important topics such as learning effectiveness, embedded learning and accountability, many of my clients are just grappling with operationalising e-learning. Of course, the ‘big questions’ are important to all organisational learning professionals. But many of my clients are still working through achieving staff equality in network speed and LMS access. So, when topics such as learning effectiveness is discussed, there is a world of difference in what needs to be done to make it effective (i.e. embedding learning into the workplace versus just getting e-learning to work on a remote desktop).

The disparity of organisational learning in Australia

I left the unconference more concerned than ever about the disparity in organisational learning strategy and operations. Learning and development budgets are being cut, there is a shortage of tertiary qualified learning practitioners, and the qualifications themselves being offered by RTOs and universities are doing no favours to organisational learning capability development. I see the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’  (i.e. those who can afford to evolve capability development with new initiatives, new technologies, new aproaches to evolve culture and climate, versus those who cannot) widening, and this will be a critical issue in Australia’s workforce capability strategy and lifelong learning.

So, thanks to the organisers and stream leaders of the unconference. I am sure scheduling will be different next year. And, perhaps we will get some real understanding of ‘why’ and tangible outputs that will move our learning and development fraternity towards new thinking and new policy.

4 Responses
  1. Hi Alison Thanks for attending the Learning Cafe UnConference and writing about it. As you have indicated and others given similar feedback is that sessions could have been longer. Others felt they learnt more in shorter but larger number of sessions. While Learning Cafe UnConference will continue to be ambitious in terms of content coverage there is a case for longer and fewer sessions.

    As for the gender and industry imbalance, many other were approached but declined to facilitate as they want to participate in the discussion (not facilitate). I suspect they were unsure of what was involved as the UnConference format was new to many. My thanks to the brave souls who did end up facilitating the sessions and did a great job given the time constraints.

    There will be design changes for the next UnConference which will be held in Melbourne in August 2012 due to demand. It will be limited to 60 participants. Interest to attend the UnConference can registered here http://bit.ly/lcafeUnConf2

    Hope to see you at the next UnConference.

    1. Alison Bickford

      Thanks for your comment, Jeevan. Good to know the Unconference will be held in Melbourne aswell.

      In relation to my comment on having time at the unconference for critical thinking, my assumption was that the position paper output (http://learningcafe.com.au/unconference/category/unconference-resources/) may provide some deep exploration into the opportunities and issues for Australia’s near future of learning. My comment comes from the consideration usually required for a position paper. However, I appreciate I may have an inappropriately high expectation on what can really be achieved at this early stage the unconference format. I look forward to sharing the forthcoming position paper with my clients.

      Best wishes in your endeavours, Jeevan. Alison

  2. Ethni Snell

    Hi Alison

    I enjoyed reading through your blog. I am doing Masters Adult literacy and numeracy education degree at AUT (Auckland University of Technology) and would like you to look at my blogs and comment on it. ethnijs.blogspot.co.nz My display name is Ethni J.S.

    I have to develop my personal philosophy about teaching and learning with technology stating my position/argument on the ways in which digital technologies (web 2.0 social media) should be used for adult literacy and numeracy education.

    Thanking you in anticipation
    Ethni Snell ethnijs@hotmail.com

    1. Alison Bickford

      Hi Ethni. Thank you for your comment, and my apologies for my delay in responding. Today is my blogging day 🙂

      Thank you for introducing me to your blog. I look forward to watching it develop as your ideas evolve. As you can see from my blog, I don’t have a great deal of experience in teaching and learning in education contexts. My experience is in organisational learning where different motivations, opportunities, issues and technology options avail. For example, the focus of organisational learning strategy is typically to improve employee productivity and not to develop better skills in learning (although I believe there is scope to teach employees how to learn in an organisation). This is a part of your argument on ‘context’ and how context impacts learning.

      Best wishes in your research endeavours, and I look forward to seeing more of you online. Kind regards, Alison.

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