The Amsterdam Diary: An Exploration of Learning Culture

In September 2012 I took a week out to explore learning culture with my social learning network. I talked to a range of people and conducted a popup learning event around some key questions and, alongside the community, produced a narrative of our findings.

These were presented across a series of blog posts throughout the week, which form the foundation of this booklet.

First, we explored who creates the learning culture within an organisation: what is the interaction between learners and leaders and how does this result in an identifiable culture? Within this culture who owns the space, the learning? As we see an increasingly rapid move away from pure, formal learning events towards far more informal and semi-formal social learning, the question of who owns and moderates these spaces, and who shapes the learning becomes ever more significant (I introduce and explore social learning in more depth in my recent book 'Exploring the World of Social Learning').

Next, I posed several questions to the group and we talked around these through a range of social learning channels.

Finally I tried to narrate the learning of the group, before moving on to explore some areas that fall outside the learning culture: forbidden learning.