Coworking Ireland

Teemu Arina is partner and CEO at Dicole, a company focused on understanding the role of social technologies in knowledge work and networked learning in organizations. Robin Good interviewed Teemu and asked him for his views on informal and mobile learning. I found his answers inspiring and highly applicable to the goals of coworking -

“Well, let’s take conferences as an example: when people go to conferences they usually do it because of other people, not because of the content. The content is just the share object for people to meet. I think we have to emphasize the social interaction that takes place in such situations when people meet. And that’s when mobile technologies become useful.

I am now in Rome and for me learning is about meeting people; I have been meeting you and your friends here and that’s the same as meeting people in conferences. So mobile technologies enable me to see what other people are thinking and get behind their interests, which creates the opportunity for us to share a conversation.

It’s kind of connecting the virtual and the physical spaces, and that’s where I think informal learning is currently failing in the educational technology field: we are not giving enough importance to the meaning of physical spaces and piazzas for meeting. When we see mobile technologies, social technologies and physical spaces intersecting very well, I think that’s when we see what true learning is all about.”

As I read the above I was also struck by the crossover between movements like Coworking, OpenCoffee Clubs and Educamps. Bernie Goldbach and team are hosting Ireland’s first Educamp at Tipperary Institute Campus on June 7th, another in a series of conferences about leveraging the internet in education. Focused on serving the interests of primary and post-primary educators it might zoom out and take a lifelong view on informal learning by touching on the topic of coworking.

Teemu went on to answer Robin’s questions about how to bring informal learning to the enterprise. The answers are just as relevant to the independent coworker as they are to a large organization -

“I think there are certain things you need to do. One is to increase serendipity, which is accidental interaction between people, perhaps by creating very effective “third placesâ€?. I mean places between the home – which is the first place – and work or school – which are second places. The third place is where you can escape school, the demands of your family and the demands of your manager to share meaningful conversations.

A place which is not connected by technology, in which people meet each other and are able to interact on topics over different fields. If you invest in such environments where you can have such conversations with your employees, that’s when you start to come up with ideas from different mindsets than your own.

It’s very easy to have a tunnel-shaped vision of thinking when you are looking for rational argumentations inside your organization. You have to look for new environments existing outside your organization and let people go there and share different conversations.”

Technorati Tags: educampireland, informal learning