The culture of business and the business of culture

Confusion is rife about what culture is and what it means in the business world. Talking recently to the training managers of several major multinational companies, I discovered that in spite of thunderously significant statements about corporate values pointing to respect, innovation, creativity, diversity and ethics in the construction of a compelling corporate culture, the only thing that is actually done about culture is to prepare future expats for the practical concerns of living in a different country. Diversity training, on the other hand – where it exists - tends to be more about compliance than reaching out to understand and embrace other cultures. The organizational impact of the multitude of complex cross-cultural interactions that take place every day appears only randomly in the strategy and hardly at all in the area of training and knowledge management.

One of the areas of confusion that help to explain this situation may be the sheer diversity of meanings attached to the notion of culture. From the very start, we have to distinguish culture from Culture (the arts). Then we have to deal with the multiple and mysterious origins of any particular person’s cultural profile. The cultures that guide our perception and interpretation of the world and people's behavior are not only national or regional cultures. We commonly list alongside these linguistic, ethnic and religious foundations of culture. But we also include corporate culture (specific to particular enterprises), occupational culture (practised by people in the same job area) and generational culture. Interestingly the culture of business (that tells us how to think about and orientate business decisions), as developed through the dominant management models, has been largely – or should I say royally? - indifferent to the diversity of cultures in the workplace, even though everything people do is first of all filtered through their specific cultural lenses. In the dominant "business culture", only economic acts are significant and reasoning always and uniquely tends towards the "bottom line", generally meaning things that can be measured in terms of short term results. Alas, culture is by definition long term!


The dominant model I’ve just referred to is of course the Harvard Business School way of thinking, which is the object of very recent commentary by Shoshana Zuboff, a former HBS professor in an article in Business Week that starts like this:

"I have come to believe that much of what my colleagues and I taught has caused real suffering, suppressed wealth creation, destabilized the world economy, and accelerated the demise of the 20th century capitalism in which the U.S. played the leading role."

Towards the end of the article, the author talks about an emerging "economy of trust" and says this, "These economies of trust are becoming even more important than economies of scale."

Creating a basis for trust is a function of all culture. Creating trust among people of different cultures is the biggest challenge businesses (and governments!) are facing in the 21st century. The age of competitive nationalism and a purely competitive economy appears to be waning. Still there's a lot of work to do on the cultural side to make it work. Perhaps this Community of Practice can make a significant contribution.

PC has struck again, and this time it's made headlines, revealing some interesting aspects of US culture.

I'm of course referring to Obama's self-deprecating joke in which he mentioned "Special Olympics". Whatever his humorous intention, which was clearly pointing at his ineptness at bowling, the nation as a whole (nearly) and the media in particular have decided that this enters into the realm of moral failure or "serious sin", with some debate (among Catholics only) about whether it is mortal or venial. (One female black TV journalist asked whether his apology to the Chairman of the Special Olympics was "enough" or did he need to do more... a pilgrimmage to Athens in a wheelchair?). Some of the commentators extend the moral fault to the audience who actually laughed. The LA Times quoted Maria Shriver, Schwarznegger's wife and sister of the Chairman of the Special Olympics, Timothy Shriver:

"While I am confident that President Obama never intended to offend anyone, the response that his comments have caused, coupled with the reaction of a prime-time audience, demonstrate the need to continue to educate the non-disabled community on the issues that confront those with a developmental disability."

This all seems to boil down to what I call the actively repressive impulse at the heart of US culture, the same that sees exclusion, shaming - followed by rehabilitation - and/or killing as the appropriate response to an undefined black list of things one shouldn't do or say, sometimes thought of simply as "un-American". The fact that such an state of affairs is a recipe for hypocrisy in a culture where hypocrisy is considered the worst of all sins is in itself both painful and amusing. Having two potentially contradictory ideas or changing one's mind is typically seen and highlighted by one’s critics as proof of hypocrisy. Politicians call it the sin of "flip-flopping", which sunk Kerry in the 2004 elections. The funniest and most extreme example I know of that is when, as a teenager, I and three other friends were interrogated by two policeman in a dark parking lot in downtown Los Angeles. They separated us and placed us in the four corners of the parking lot to interrogate each of us individually. Not finding any contradiction in our stories (we had gone to see a film and were getting back in the car) one cop came over to me and asked for my driver's license on which it indicated that I was born in Chicago and my address was in West Los Angeles. He repeatedly asked me - with a change of tone each time - "how do you explain that it says here you were born in Chicago and live in Los Angeles?", a question that showed an amazing ignorance of sociology, since 2/3 of the population of southern California at the time had migrated from elsewhere. But he obviously thought he was on to some deep contradiction, a flaw in consistency, a proof of guilt without there even being a crime. (Maybe he also thought anyone born in Chicago was a member of the mafia).

This may seem to have little to do with the original point, but there is a connection, one that Ralph Waldo Emerson had already noticed in his famous observation (in "Self-Reliance"):
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do."

Had Emerson lived another century and a bit he could have replaced “statesmen, philosophers and divines” by "media". He would undoubtedly be appalled by the way all this has played out, even as his championing of self-reliance has been largely accepted. The concept itself has become a shibboleth but its meaning has come to represent the opposite of what he intended: an incitement to conformity and artificial consistency. Self-reliance now carries with it the obligation to be in phase with the crowd, which is precisely what PC tries to achieve: artificial consistency. Whatever people think or feel, they must conform to a formal code that will help them think and feel according to the norms. Self-reliance has become self-control. We see it in the concern with "continuing to educate" mentioned by Maria Shriver. Education in this usage has nothing to do with learning and everything to do with behaving predictably. It consists not only in knowing what not to say but also when not to laugh, even if you think it's funny. Some may remember Freud’s contention that humor and the ensuing laughter are the result of a spontaneous and pleasure-inducing shock between the unconscious and the conscious, which he considered a healthy way of letting off potentially unhealthy steam but which requires us to accept and appreciate ambiguity. This new form of PC education consists of not allowing any steam to escape and be perceived by others for fear of its corrupting effect.

And that leads me to an even deeper dimension of this question: the fundamentally and in many ways increasingly repressive impulse at the heart of a culture founded on the ideals of "freedom" and self-determination. Freedom has traditionally been seen as a good in itself and indeed more than a good, a moral ideal to be enjoyed at home and exported abroad, extending increasingly over recent decades to what Freud might call the right not just of the person but of the id (das Es) to achieve fulfillment so long as no visible damage is done to others (who can always sue if there is damage!). This freedom of the id – or the person as id - can be seen as the opposite of civilization, whose role is "sublimatation", avoiding both the direct expression and the systematic repression of the drives of the id. This new version of freedom (I have a constitutional right to do what I want irrespective of my social environment) inevitably requires some kind of mechanism to keep the lid on the id and its potential for chaos and destruction. Enter three actors (the ghostbusters!): repressive laws (including a deep commitment to capital punishment), PC and... silence.

If PC is a list of words people shouldn't say, silence is a quality forcibly attached to ideas one shouldn't have. There are many examples of this but I'll offer one that is very obvious today. As current events demonstrate the US economy and political system in the way it actually works (as opposed to the way it was designed and is believed to work) could be objectively described the opposite of democratic. Complicity between bankers, industrialists, politicians, the media and practically anyone who is assertively greedy and surrounded by good lawyers has made "the voice of the people" something of a sad joke, the realization of which has in recent weeks sent a shockwave through the population as it learns that the "average Joe" is nothing but a convenient sacrificial victim of those who run the show. This system built on cupidity and silence remained stable so long as trickle down economics seemed to work. All those greedy bastards tied to power mongers were actually keeping the machine going and therefore doing their job for the benefit of all. After all, if the crumbs that fall off the table are tasty and plentiful, who needs bread? But when you are required to collect the crumbs and give them back to the seated diners who have suddenly discovered that they've devoured all the bread (to say nothing of the meat and potatoes), one starts to feel the pain of hunger accompanied by pangs of resentment. And we begin to see who will ends up in tomorrow’s stew!

All this was made possible by... silence, in other words the repression of both dialogue and debate. The particular form of individualism developed in the US has made it possible for those in control to program ideas in a way similar to the way PC programs words. There have been and still are subjects that simply cannot be talked about, tabu, repressed from public awareness. (At the same time intellectuals are free to examine these things in their ivory towers so long as none of it spills over into the public arena, which it won’t because the concepts they use are on a virtual black list). The concept of socialism and its multiple avatars in the real world - which used to be more conveniently lumped under the rubric of Marxist communism, aka totalitarianism - has been a constant in the list of "things to be rejected before being discussed". It's now making a virulent comeback - in its repressed form, i.e. as a hobgoblin, a factor of dread - in reaction to the rising danger of taking seriously the concepts and practices associated with it (e.g. managing the collective wealth) as a response to growing criticism from within of the capitalist system. How that will play out is anyone's guess, since it has less to do with political decision-making and everything to do with the viability of the current financial system and ultimately with the grasping, pinching, casting off, squeezing, smothering or caressing of capitalism's "invisible hand" (hand actually do other things than just pointing fingers). What's interesting - and infuriating - is that the PC effect is producing its usual Manichaean division into choosing between good and evil: capitalism (us) and socialism (them... i.e. the unenlightened). No need for nuance, which we all know is a time-waster that makes decision-making difficult, complex (beyond the average Joe's understanding) and impossible to rally around, the way one rallies around a flag.

Depressing? Not entirely. It’s just the media’s insistence on following the white lists and banishing everything on the black list that hurts. The LA Times article starts out with this sentence:
“Despite the president's apology, athletes and others say they are disappointed with his remark on Jay Leno's show”
It maintains the idea of a uniform consensus of umbrage and indignation until the final paragraphs of the article, which concludes in this manner:
_____________

Brothers Rich and Ted Olson have participated in the Games for more than three decades and don't have enough space in their suburban Glen Ellyn, Ill., home for all their medals and ribbons. The Olsons, whose scores typically run in the 140s and 150s, didn't find the joke offensive, but Rich laughed when he heard the president's score.

"That's not very good," he said. "It wouldn't beat us. He needs to practice."
__________

They actually didn’t take umbrage and pushed the humour even further.

Civilization is not dead or totally repressed. It has just been pushed to the end of articles, where people won’t read it (or worse won’t understand it because it doesn’t jibe with the rest)!

The culture of greed

Today's LA Times report on Schwarzenegger's fund-raising proclivities (Where Schwarzenegger goes, money follows) includes this observation:

"That's the way the system works, and it troubles me," said Derek Cressman, Western regional director for Common Cause, who worked with Schwarzenegger on the initiative and has written a book critical of his fundraising. "The governor, like every other elected official in our state, pays more attention to those people who support him than those who don't. And those people who support him with big checks get noticed."

Schwarzenegger obviously has a better sense of the law than Rod Blagojevich, whose main excuse is that what he did is perfectly consistent with political culture in Chicago, where everything has always been up for sale. But how significant is the difference? And however signficant, what do the two cases - among thousands of others - tell us about "democracy in America"? To me the answer seems simple: politics is a marketplace and as with all marketplaces there is a white market and a black market. The white market is dominated by people who are usually (but not always) careful to remain within the constraints of the law, while manipulating those constraints is an integral part of their well-honed craft of business and art of politics. In both case this translates as a way of getting an unfair advantage over one's competitors and culling profit from unwitting consumers and voters. And because it's white it appears invisible. The black market is dominated by close and surprisingly secret networks of accomplices whose philosophy is less to "share the spoils" (sharing isn't a core value of their system) than to protect each other from discovery (the extreme case being omertà).

But when you look at the sociology of white and black markets you discover another signficant factor. White markets are dominated by those who have accumulated wealth (e.g. legitimately invested capital that then needs to be protected through persistent commercial advantage) whereas black markets thrive through the energy and initiative of those who have no capital but are intent on adopting the white life style. Schwarzenegger is a white market politician because his wealth came from another source. Blagojevich is a black market politician because 1) he's relatively "poor" 2) he was nurtured by the secretive black market system and remains loyal to its practices. Schwarzegger doesn't need to milk politics for his personal survival; Blagojevich does, at least insofar as "survival" is defined as living according to the minimal standards of the elite. He was driven by personal debt.

In other words, white markets and black markets are the US version of yin and yang, where the white, sitting comfortably on top, still depends on the dynamics and energy of the black, most of which is attracted to the white (wishing to stay legitimate) but a significant part of which remains attached to the values and habits generated by its roots in poverty, deploying its intelligence primarily to acquire enough to be seen as white and eventually to move over to the white side.


But the comparison with yin and yang should stop there. However similar the dynamics, all cultures are different. Chinese yin and yang is based on the value of harmony: natural opposites flow towards each other in order to establish a dynamic balance. US American yin and yang is based on greed, the belief that everyone pursuing his or her self-interest will automatically produce a better equilibrium as they move over to the other side or move up from where they were. And combined with the Puritanical ethos inherited from our historical predecessors, that equilibrium depends on the domination by the wealthy of the poor, since the wealthy are protected by their wealth from having to violate the laws in order to survive (and can, in any case, manipulate them, thereby attaining recognition, in the Puritanical scheme of things, as the "virtuous"), whereas the poor (the dark "yang") are forced to organize themselves outside the law and risk being caught before they are recongized as "yin" and so be considered automatically as virtuous. Blagojevich is a typical "yang" trying to become "yin" and almost making it, but still living within the yang system that is founded on black market principles.

Greed is indeed the motor of everything and officially recognized as such in the capitalist/puritan ethos. And so, in the midst of the biggest crisis of capitalism in 200 years (yes, bigger than 1929 because striking deeper into the system in a world that is now clearly post-industrial), the news is dominated by stories of greed, the latest and perhaps most spectacjular being the case of Bernard Madeoff (sorry for the spelling but it is true to say that he "made off" with $50 billion of other people's money). Was he yin or yang? Or does he just represent the principle at the middle of the whole dynamic... greed? Is he the black dot in the white or the white dot in the black? He went from investing "$5,000 that he said was earned from working as a lifeguard and installing sprinklers" (Wikipedia) to chairing the NASDAQ. And he used his "reputation" to cheat both hedge funds and charities out of their assets. And therein we discover the real secret of all societies and why greed is the least stable principle of social organization: reputation. Trust depends on reputationon and no society or economy can survive without trust. It doesn't matter how much law you have (and how many lawyers): trust is the foundation of everything. But in a society of greed trust is considered naive. Contracts replace promises and relationships. Yet human nature craves trust and human beings continue to build relationships around it... or at least around the illusion of trust. And so it has come to pass. Hasn't our whole commercial culture evolved away from the foundational principle of trust towards the subtler and more "businesslike" notion of creating the illusion of trust while at the same time seeking an infinite number of ways to betray it (legitimately or illegitimately, according to circumstance) ? I don't think the people who invested in Madoff's Ponzi scheme were inordinately trustful. They bought into his illusion because he was seen to be a solid symbol of the white market, legitimate - legally sanctioned and officially organized - greed as opposed to lawless greed. His reputation was such that they couldn't imagine he was operating according to the alternative laws of the black market.

We are living an historical moment when the culture of greed is undergoing a serious shock. Will the current crisis be solved by the self-policing of the greedy or by the radical calling into question of greed as a core value, the lowest common denominator of social motivation? In any case, the confusion is deep. The neat black and white of yin and yang has gone surprisingly grey. The economic and managerial culture, exported from the US to the rest of the world for the past 60 years, is unlikely to be the same in the decade to come and beyond.

Facebook and the culture of learning

Jay Cross, following the lead of JP Rangaswami has provoked a discussion of the possible pertinence of Facebook as a tool for learning. As someone who attributes to Facebook a good part of the successful emergence of the Social Web as a general cultural phenomenon, which I see as the key to the future of learning in a radical break with the past, I have no axe to grind with Facebook itself. Yet I allowed myself to take a contrarian position on this question by proposing first to situate the cultural foundations of the Facebook phenomenon in very general terms (an appeal to US individualism with a strong appeal to ambient narcissism) and then to examine the possible factors of motivation behind some of the observable emerging trends in knowledge management through social tools. I could have gone much further by examining the nature of what I would call the collectivist impulse that is a very strong but perpetually marginalised component of US culture, but I was only making a brief commentary on the issue raised by Jay. A further comment by Clark Quinn, in which he takes the position that Facebook is about doing rather than being, provoked a further comment, which I published on Jay's blog. Since it raises a possibly controversial issue, I'm reproducing here to give it a specifically cultural (rather than learning-related) context. The starting point is the very civilized dialogue that is now taking place across blogs and on into conferences and unconferences in which people who generally think and work in similar ways have come together to predict and sometimes prepare the future of both learning and corporate communication. What follows is my second commentary to Jay's Informal Learning blog.

__________

It’s interesting how we can all be part of a culture that agrees on principles that include transparency, generosity and trust. I don’t think any of us would have a problem reaching a consensus on those ideals, their pragmatic interest and the necessity to promote them so that they become a part of the entire professional culture that surrounds us. But sometimes I have the feeling that our conversations resemble a political convention pushing candidates and platforms and engaging in massive self-justification. The risk is a lack of critical perspective.

The danger I see in this – as well as the explanation of the temptation itself – is that a different kind of command-and-control model is looming in the background. Could it be that having failed to establish control over subordinates and colleagues because of new lifestyles inaugurated and reinforced partly by technology within a culture that is, at bottom, both individualist and consumerist, we are seeking to create new norms of monitoring and surveillance built on the now trendy principle of gaining knowledge of everything everyone is “doing” in order to micromanage them? Knowledge is power. And the road to consolidating that power is the appeal to the narcissism of the few who set the standard for a newly idealized exhibitionism. The best way to do that is to create behavioral norms of self-revelation. Confession has always been the most efficient way of solving crimes!

When we began transforming corporate culture in the 1980s by getting people to learn how to use the PC, we had to struggle with the resistance of managers (IT managers being clearly the worst of the lot) to the idea of transferring power to lowly employees. This was a typical cultural problem… i.e. typical because it played out below the threshold of conscious awareness. But it was real. It helps explain the victory of MS-DOS over Mac in the corporate world: the austerity of DOS was a gauge of seriousness, ensuring a better focus on highly controlled work processes.

With the advent of the World Wide Web things got seriously out of hand after the only limited damage of Windows (tardily imitating Mac). With the Web, staff could do all sorts of things that had nothing to do with their programmed tasks: personal e-mail, games, pornography, blogging, etc. all of them considered to be absolute distractions from serious work.

So what’s the best cynical strategy for re-establishing order? Create a culture that makes spying the norm, not through clandestine operations and strict policing but through the provoked complicity of the spied-upon. Promoting the idea of self-promotion, encouraging exhibitionism as a basic value, one which will be perceived as a key to advancement, is by far the most efficient way of ultimately gaining control over behavior. Looked at from this perspective, Clark’s remark that it isn’t “look at me” but “look at what I’m doing” says it all. Command-and-control style management isn’t interested in the “me’s” that populate the workplace; they’re interested in controlling what those self-interested me’s are doing. And why not, if everyone agrees? It could be the solution to the problem. But I see it less as a question of learning than one of spying, controlling and “normalizing” behavior.

And are we sure everyone actually does agree with the permanent need for self-exposure? I’m not. Can we be sure that it truly will solve the problem of distraction? I’m not convinced of that either.

Is this a conscious strategy of subversion? Certainly not, but most of management and power culture isn’t conscious. My analysis may seem slightly paranoid, but I firmly believe society needs the milder forms of paranoia (conspiracy theories) as a ferment to help refine our analysis of innovation and the motives behind it. After all, it may be the only known antidote to the syndrome of the political convention!

__________

Going beyond the commentary published on Informal Learning, I should append my own belief that, as in all phases of cultural evolution (or revolution), there will inevitably be a pronounced struggle between centrifugal and centripetal forces. In such situations it's always interesting to see by what means and how thoroughly these conflicts are resolved. The centrifugal trend can lead to the emergence of new and multiple centers of gravity radically revising the old system or simply transfer mass within the existing system to other areas reconfiguring superficially the dynamic gravitional relationsuips. The centripetal forces can, when they are effective, pull in the energy and reverse the inertia of the forces that were initially directed outwards, creating new internal dynamics. It all depends on how flexible the systems are as well as how consolidated the force is in either direction. That is why I think that even when we are impressed by a new disruptive force, we need to look carefully at how the non-disruptive forces will react.

Phoning it in

In response to some of the contributions to this month's Big Question (Lead the Charge?) on the Learning Circuits blog, I don't see this as a question of technology itself or even technology literacy. It's more a question of cultural shift.

When, more than a century ago, there were only a few telephones around, most people wondered how those damn things worked and some even wondered out loud whether they could serve any useful purpose. When I settled in France straight out of university in the 70s, telephones were few and far between. My wife had never had a telephone in her home! While she had no problem with the technology itself - thanks to pay phones! - she and her circle of friends definitely didn't have a telephone culture (in contrast to my own, acquired instinctively throughout my childhood in California). On the other hand, as soon as France modernized (very quickly), the whole population adopted a strong telephone culture. Nobody analyzed; nobody "organized" the cultural shift; nobody pro-actively developed telephone literacy. It just happened, though it took a few years. (I did, however, a decade later, work on an interactive video training program called “Make the Telephone Work for You” in the UK and “Le Téléphone à Votre Service” in France, which focused on telephone etiquette with clients).

Does the example of the telephone sound trivial? Perhaps it does to baby boomer nerds who have invested so heavily in building their own cutting-edge knowledge of all things digital that they are unwilling to admit that those who don't spend their days and nights meditating technological innovation are condemned to living in analogue un-networked hell. For them (i.e. us, or at least some of us), yes, it's complex, otherwise it wouldn't be worthwhile. But as Professor Mitra's "hole in the wall" experiments have shown, you don't need to be initiated into an exclusive club to use it... and to use it creatively and collaboratively!

The social Web has started off in a predictable way within the consumer society, with an emphasis on narcissism and self-indulgence. This puts it clearly at odds with corporate culture. That could be considered a more serious problem than complexity. But that reminds me of the work I did in the 80s when I was saddled with the task of trying to kickstart a PC culture in companies. My analysis of the Mac-MS-DOS war, ultimately won by Microsoft, was that enterprises chose IBM/Dos over Mac because it was LESS attractive than the Mac. You weren't likely to have fun with it, so it was less of a threat to the command and control culture of the corporate world. Senior management and IT departments were worried sick about the dispersal of authority that might occur if everyone was managing their own data and free to use such flexible tools. So what happened? Two things:

1. Client-server applications took over, creating a whole new culture for almost the entire workforce, a culture which is with us to this day.
2. Dos was replaced by Windows and PCs evolved, culturally speaking, into carbon copies of the Mac, with more and more multimedia frills (for a while Apple was even left behind as the much more democratic Windows concept produced more significant innovation).
   

Then of course came the Web, peer-to-peer technology and an emerging netcentric culture with the Web 2.0. The model hasn't changed yet, and there are numerous concerns and worries on the part of those who feel their authority may be threatened, but there's little doubt that it will happen. Pushing it through official channels may be the worst thing to do, because it will provoke resistance. I would put my effort into making it work from the bottom up and demonstrate how it can achieve other things than self-promotion.

The definition of informal learning

My friend and colleague, Jay Cross, on his Learning Blog has challenged the community with the question “what is informal learning?". Here's my definition in a nutshell:

Informal learning is perception mediated by social interaction and converting into behavior, which in turn converts back into perception.

How do children learn their language? Answer: by actively constructing it informally. Second anwser: by staying free of any formal learning until the age of 5 or 6! A child's language learning goes through stages but the process is cyclical. It always involves:

1. listening and discriminating those elements (sounds, phrases, sentences) that appear to be meaningful, whose meaning is indicated by both emotion (affect) and action (association producing both causal and descriptive links between things, events and language),

2. participating in language production experimentally (speaking) before mastering the rules, starting with repeated syllables and growing incrementally as proprioceptivity develops,

3. Interacting in varied situations of real and simulated need (play), judging the value of the reactions provoked and adapting.

How the brain builds language competency (sentence forming capacity) only God and Noam Chomsky can tell us. But the easily observable fact is that the only way it can be achieved is informally. When children get to the phase of formal language learning (i.e. school, with a little bit of useless parental coaching before that: e.g. “not 'he goed' but 'he went'), it is style that is taught formally, not language. Why the educational systems of the world fail to recognize this is beyond me, although I can think of some good political motives for perpetuating this error. All of which may explain why it's so hard to learn style and so few achieve success with style. There are too many people teaching it and not enough learning it. This is also why no amount of formal teaching can result in the learning of a foreign language. At best teaching provides a map that gives enough spatial orientation for the learner to begin interacting with a real environment in a state of minimized confusion. And spending too much time on the map before confronting the real informally will distort perception of the real. But how many teachers think of their work as first of all provoking the growth of spatial orientation?

Informal learning can be thought of as the kind of mental map making we all end up doing on our own in any area where we feel minimally competent. Our map evolves significantly as we continue to explore our world and refine our skills through our interactions with people and things (think of Columbus's mental picture of the globe over the span of his four voyages). If we lack confidence in our own map and cling to the belief that the official map (e.g. curriculum) proposed in formal learning is the only valid thing, we end up learning... nothing! And although it's a notorious myth that Europeans believed the world was flat before Columbus proved otherwise – a falsehood that I was taught formally at school! - the formal learning of the time taught that there was nothing but a vast ocean between the west of Europe and the east of Asia. Thanks to Columbus's experience and evolving mental map we now know otherwise.

Franz Ackerman, Mental Map: Evasion V

Second Life... compared to what?

The Big Question this month on the Learning Circuits Blog is:

Second Life Training?

I take a very simplistic view of this. I see SL as just another place to go, with its own set of rules and, inevitably, with its own culture. You can learn things at the street corner, as you can in Second Life. It depends on who and what is there and the culture shared by those present. This is already the case for Second Life, of course, since cultures are created by users sharing the same space and the same tools. SL could therefore become - or perhaps already is - another informal space in which human activity can be organized. From that activity learning is of course possible. But turning it into a formal space for learning is fraught with risks, as many of the contributors have pointed out. The problem with formal training is that there's always something planned, programmed and enforced about it. SL is designed to be both informal (unpredictable) and artificial (programmed and controlled). There will always be a risk of contradiction and cultural confusion if learners are expected to use it as anything other than an indicated resource. Bandwith isn't the only problem; implicit cultural values and questions of learner identity are as well. But if SL is simply an alternative resource, it doesn't seem to me very different from other resources, from books to sims. It's something that requires a larger framework, one that clearly belongs to the real world, to achieve its meaning.

More fundamentally I see the SL phenomenon as similar to Esperanto, though it certainly is considerably more seductive. Like Esperanto, SL proposes an artificial and simplified version of natural human activity. For it to be truly useful as a standard device for learning, its use would have to be very widespread and its acceptance (independent of use) universal. The barriers to that seem to me such that, apart from local initiatives characterized by strong direction and a clear notion of structured goals, this is unlikely to happen on a major scale.

On the other hand, I expect that in the near future other VR environments will emerge, environments whose base culture (the way people interact) will be radically different and much better adapted to learning. And if they are truly adapted to learning one could assume that they just might be adaptable to teaching as well! This would constitute the revolution many of us have been waiting for or even helping to provoke: turning the current educational paradigm - designed for teaching only - on its head.

Learner identity has always been the key issue for me in any learning process. Second Life does two things that I consider suspect: it promotes fantasized identity, possibly inhibiting the natural evolution of real identity, and it reinforces traditionally overblown instructor authority by compounding the manipulative powers and artificial power of "knowledge authorities" through the addition of technological prowess. The culture of instructional intimidation which has been with us for centuries is manifestly still with us today, even on the putatively democratic Social Web!

Although I see this side of things as a step backwards, the contribution of SL to the historical process of putting learning before teaching may be pertinent. It consists of provoking experiments and eventually identifying best practice. It also consists of demonstrating the limits of this type of environment. A little more practice, a little more cultural analysis and a lot more innovation might bring us to a truly useful version of the power of virtual worlds. There are already other initiatives taking place. There's no reason why the virtual cannot pay its respects to the real. For the moment, Second Life is drawing the buzz and the curiosity on the basis of the attraction of fantasy and escape. It may be nothing more than a necessary prelude to something deeper and richer.