I’m working on A Pattern Language For Self-Organized Learning Environments* and recently I had the chance to test one of the organizing patterns – The Spinning Top. It was used as a framework for a Learning Festival organized within the L&D Shakers community. I had this opportunity thanks to my dear and old friend Gabi (from PlayLearn) who invited me to co-design the festival with her and three other (learning) designers: Anamaria Dorgo, Lavinia Mehedintiu and Alex Poe. Not only I enjoyed working with this lovely team but I also received encouraging feedback on the framework from L&D professionals that work in fast-paced dynamic environments where – to my mind – modeling learning as an emerging process can be more fruitful than modeling it as a technocratic/bureaucratic process to be tightly controlled.
Lavinia wrote an excellent article that explains what we did and why. In her words:
“The purpose of this festival was to inspire learning autonomy by deconstructing the learning process in a fun and immersive way. In this article, we’re covering why learning autonomy is important, what the learning festival looked like, and a learning framework you might want to use in creating an environment where people take ownership of their learning process.”
* … more on this soon; it is part of the the book I’ve been writing for a while :-)