August 30, 2009
learning 2.0

Learning 2.0 Tetrad Through Marshall McLuhan

If you haven’t heard of Marshall McLuhan, well you’re simply missing out on one of Canada’s most innovative minds.

Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program of Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto since 1983 wrote McLuhan for Managers in 2003. Shamefully, I didn’t know about the book until this year, courtesy of Jon Husband.

In the book, Derrick (and co-author Mark Federman) introduce the Laws of Media through a tetrad:

  • Extend (what does the artefact enhance or intensify or make possible or accelerate)
  • Obsolesce (what is pushed aside by the new organ)
  • Retrieve (what older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form)
  • Reverse (what is the reversal potential of the new form)

Harold Jarche has written about the tetrads and applied it to commons-based peer production. I’m sure there are others out there as well.

As I unplugged for almost 4 weeks during the summer, I began mentally noodling what the tetrads may look like in terms of a Learning 2.0 philosophy. I define Learning 2.0 in a corporate learning setting as follows:

  • Philosophy – shifting from training is an event, to learning is continuous, connected & collaborative. (simply put – moving from solely formal classroom and eLearning, to formal, informal and social learning concepts)
  • Alignment – being less fixated on a centralized training function, and more on a federated (hub and spoke if you will) talent and collaboration holistic entity

Thoughts?

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