George Siemens is an instructor at Red River College (RRC) in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is also Founder and President of Complexive Systems Inc., "a learning lab focused on assisting organizations develop integrated learning structures to meet the needs of global strategy execution." He is well known internationally for his writing and research that he self publishes at his elearnspace.org "everything elearning" website (www.elearnspace.org) as well as at his "connectivism" website (www.connectivism.ca), both of which include links to his blogs, wikis and discussion forums, where Siemens and other smart educators foster meaningful discussion on "how our thinking, learning, and organizational activities are impacted through technology and societal changes."

Please expand on your point of view that "the nature of each intended learning experience should drive the selection of tools and processes."

Sometimes we’re involved with informal learning, sometimes it’s formal learning, sometimes it’s learning I do on my own, other times it’s in a community of practice, other times it’s performance support. Each one of those situations of learning have learning approaches and learning intents. Are you trying to innovate? Are you trying to build core knowledge skills? Are you trying to meet a level of compliance as issued by a government, an agency, or a corporation? Each one of those learning needs and learning tasks requires a different process and different tools. Corporations or organizations often don’t see that selection as an ongoing process. The distance education department may select an LMS and then push all the courses that the institution offers through the LMS rather than being prepared to look at different tools and different processes to teach different types of subject matter at different levels.

So, depending on the course and the students within the course, I may not want to use the mandated or suggested LMS of my institution.

Right. An LMS can be very effective for undergraduate education in which a lot of basic core information is presented and shared, where the learners coming in may not understand the terminology or basic principles that shape the field. However, once they get more advanced and they’ve adopted some critical thinking skills, their learning needs to be transferred into more of a dialogue-based process. They’re no longer in a passive learning stage where they’re acquiring information and knowledge. They’ve moved to a stage where they’re actively co-creating the knowledge or the information that they, or others, will consume. And at that point you need to move away to a different type of tool that’s perhaps more socially based or dialogue based.

How would you characterize the adoption and growth of, so to speak, "social technology" in higher education?

With regard to social technology (tools we can use to connect with other people), the real area to look at is why is it that suddenly they’ve taken off? It could be a blog; or it could be a wiki that’s used for collaboration; it could be a podcast; it could be any type of tool, even an aggregator, RSS, or social bookmarking tool. I think the (growth and adoption of such tools) has been very slow. I remember probably about three or four years ago I did a presentation at our college in order to seek some kind of adoption with these types of tools, and, as far as I’m aware of, other than wikis, I don’t think there’s anyone in our organization who’s blogging other than myself and the president. If you take an average administrator or an educator, and you talk about what is the nature of an educational experience, very few would argue against the notion that it’s socially based, that it requires dialogue, that it requires high levels of interaction and engagement. Yet, academically, it’s almost like we see those pastures over there but we’re in a shoot that leads us to a totally different corral. In the United States, it may be from a state or federal level, and in Canada it’s from a provincial level, in which you’re mandated to achieve certain types of objectives or targets, and in some cases funding is attached to those types of achievements. So you begin not to do what’s best for the learners and the learning cycle. Instead, you do what’s best to ensure you have ongoing funding and for the health of the organization to meet the state or the provincial defined targets. We can lament about that all we want, because that’s a systemic thing, and I don’t think that’s going to change rapidly at all.

What do you think about podcasting?

Theoretically a podcast can be a very valuable tool for learning. By the same account, during times when we take on new technologies, we treat them like this is the solution to everything that ails us. It’s important that we recognize that education itself is a very holistic concept, so when we change something, the nature of the structure itself changes. And when that changes, the validity of any new innovation needs to be rethought as you move on. We’re always rethinking and deciding. In five years or three years, podcasts may not be as intriguing as they are today because the educational climate may have changed.

You present all over the world. What topics of interest are you focusing on today?

One, in particular, focuses on the changing nature of knowledge. I’m attempting to communicate how the nature of knowledge has changed in our society today by the types of tools that we have access to. I’ll be looking more exclusively at how our organizational structures need to be revisited to account for the change in the nature of knowledge.

How does the changing nature of knowledge relate to the notion of information literacy, i.e., knowing what information you need, and understanding how to find, evaluate, and present valid information?

We need to be able to look at a resource and define its validity. We need to be able to personally identify a deficit or a knowledge gap and have the capacity to fill that on our own by finding resources on the Internet or wherever else resources are available to us. From a literacy or skills-based perspective, it’s a critical concept. One of the main things - and I’ll base this on my own experience - is that I need a reorganization of beliefs and perspectives and views about what it means to know and what it means to be in a state of knowing. We’ve been taught to value certainty, and much of our education programs are an attempt to create certainty so that we know that something is true or we know this or that is the right way to do something. And increasingly, if we look at some of the statistics about how information and knowledge are growing, knowledge is doubling. It depends who you’re talking to, but it can be anywhere from once a year to every 18 months that knowledge doubles. Information literacy skills talk about how to navigate that sea of information and knowledge. However, I’m interested in the impact or the capacity of the individual to be able to not navigate it specifically, but to be able to have a changed mindset of what it is to know something. So, that knowing is sort of a suspended state, in which the learner accepts ambiguity and resists the urge to take information and nail it down when it’s still in a transitory state, where we allow information and knowledge to speak for itself sometimes, rather than try to corral it into our current constructs and thinking. The development of these particular perspectives toward knowledge are, in my eyes, the greatest challenges we’re going to have as educators.

When you move to information abundance, you have to begin relying on different approaches to disseminate, evaluate and store information or knowledge. Karen Stephenson makes an interesting point when she says that, "I collect my knowledge in my friends" (see www.netform.com/html/icf.pdf). I think that gets to the heart of what’s happening with these online social networks today. Information and knowledge are so abundant that we can’t process them ourselves anymore. Even if I’m an expert in a particular field, I’m unable to process the sheer quantity of knowledge that’s being generated by that space. So I have to start offloading the processing of this knowledge and the attempt to derive meaning from all this knowledge into a network of trusted colleagues, a network of friends, a network of trusted blogs, a technology-enabled network.

In doing that we can lessen the influence of institutional structures that historically have been the primary owners and disseminators of information and knowledge.

Right. But in all fairness, one of the big things is that there’s a lot of good. I’m not one of the people who completely dislikes or despises classrooms and all of the traditional views of education. I love listening to a good lecture. It’s not that I’m saying we need to abolish that entire concept. I’m taking a more holistic view. Classrooms are great. They serve certain needs very well. Even an LMS can serve things very well. But it’s not the end; it’s not the all. Learning and knowledge acquisition and knowledge creation is such a complex process that one tool and one system will never be able to attend to the full array of these principles and concepts.