Learning is social–and what this means to community design.

We have not had web sites forever.  In fact the first web site was built at CERN on August 6, 1991.  That’s approximately 20 years ago.  Moreover, in the early days not everybody got to build or host a web site of their own. 

Today however just about anybody can create a web site.  My post today is a reflection of how people use web sites and what that learning curve looks like.  Let me begin with a very rudimentary graphic that tells us what this learning curve looks like for us.

Stage one:  Dump

This is where a person or group of people create a web site and start dumping all this information / content on it.  This initial stage is fantastically energetic.  The idea that we can aggregate information in one place is a wonderful idea and everybody signs on to help with the ‘dump’.

Stage two:  Organize

As the site owners realize how successful they have been at stage one – Dump, they begin to feel slight anxiety attacks too.  There is really just too much information out there.  In response they tentatively start to organize content in categories / pages and folders.  Some might get so good at it that they carve out a whole career out of this task and become Information Architects.  Others struggle with the fallacy of most structures which is that it will become obsolete soon.

Stage three:  Digest

Most people often remain chained to this never ending loop that is stage one and two.  Something needed to change.  Yes, we like aggregating information and organizing it – no matter how good or bad our content architecture.  However we realized that the volume of information and the complexity of our content architecture made us less likely to digest all this great stuff.  Can there really be too much of a good thing?

So what changed?  Some of these site owners realized that information that cannot be consumed is really worthless.  So they put their heads together and came up with ways with which they could make it easier for a user to digest information.  Here’s some of those ways:

• Whenever possible, as frequently as possible, break information down into smaller chunks.  If you thought a PowerPoint slide with text was silly, why would you think a web site full of content and widgets was smart?
• Digesting information in order to understand and apply it to help us improve how we work is really what we’ve been doing for many, many years but it is called learning.  So how do we apply the principles of learning design to how we digest information.
• Learning is social.  We are better at learning from one another in communities than we are from CBTs or websites full of content.  The latter resources are very informational but they also do isolate us from the practice of what we learnt.
• Last but not least, any design that enables social learning will need to jettison our intentions to dump and organize information.  Liken this to how a rocket jettisons it’s bottom and middle layers to orbit the world.  We need to free our websites from this compulsive need to dump and organize (and control) in order to enable learning through discovery and reflection amongst a community of practitioners.