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.