Learning 101

Estee Solomon Gray

Chief e-learning officer
InterWise Inc.
Santa Clara, California

When day is done, I believe that we'll all be staring up at the heavens and saying that live e-learning was the Batman of the new economy -- mostly cloaked but always present: "cloaked" in the sense that, with the Internet, "learning" occurs automatically and is melded with "doing."

That's a big shift from the days when knowledge was "matter," when educators packaged material and then funneled it into the heads of learners. The trouble with that system was that, while learners acquired a lot of facts and lots of theory, they ended up with little sense of themselves as doing what they were learning about.

E-technology changes all that. As we work with the Web, learning moves from knowledge as matter to knowledge as practice -- which is wonderful. No one wants to feel, "Oh, I'm having a learning moment now."

So, whereas the conventional wisdom of the old economy was that "content is king," in the new economy, context is king. You see that shift, for example, when a company uses live e-learning technology to deliver knowledge about new business applications. Customers learn such applications as they go.

The Web not only allows people to learn in context; it also allows them to learn in communities. There's a whole taxonomy of places on the Net -- portal exchanges, community sites, support sites -- that serve all kinds of professionals and that mix business with learning. No one talks about those places in terms of learning, but that's why people go to them.

Estee Solomon Gray (estee@congruity.com) founded Congruity, a Palo Alto-based technology-management consulting firm, before joining InterWise Inc. InterWise is an e-learning company whose offerings include InterWise Millennium, a program that provides live, instructor-led learning via the Internet, and Choice 2000 Charter School, a fully accredited secondary school that is entirely Web-delivered.

Marc Rosenberg

Principal
Diamond Technology Partners Inc.
Belle Meade, New Jersey

A few years ago, my favorite TV commercial was an ad in which two guys were sitting at a computer and putting animated flames onto what would become their company's Web site. One guy said something like "Well, gee, does it sell products?" And the other guy answered, "I don't know. But doesn't it look cool?"

We all have a tendency to fall in love with glitz. And even in learning, glitz matters -- but it isn't the only thing that matters. There are Web sites that are wonderful from a look-and-feel perspective but that can't teach a thing. And some of the most boring-looking Web sites can teach volumes. Learning is the bottom line: Does a site teach what it's supposed to teach, as effectively as it possibly can?

The need for e-learning systems that are substantive, as well as integrated into business processes, points to the big breakthrough in learning today: knowledge management -- the delivery of exactly the right information to exactly the people who need it, when they need it. A salesman on the road wants to know about changes in his company's product line and about what his competitors are doing. He doesn't want a 10-hour course. He wants to go to a Web site where someone has posted the information that he needs.

That's knowledge management. With that model, the Web begins to look more like a library than like a classroom. You can use whatever helps you learn: courses, articles, collaboration tools like email. And you can draw on information that's organized to be easily accessible. That way, the Web becomes a place where you're learning all the time.

Marc Rosenberg (rosenbergm@diamtech.com) is a 20-year veteran of the organizational-learning field. Before joining Diamond Technology Partners Inc., he held key positions at AT&T, where he developed that company's e-learning strategy. His latest book, E-learning: Strategies for Delivering Knowledge in the Digital Age, is scheduled to be published this month by McGraw-Hill. Diamond Technology Partners is a Chicago-based e-commerce-services firm.