Tag: knowledge

Reinventing the path from knowledge to action in global health

At the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), we have just begun to share a publication like no other. It is titled Overcoming barriers to vaccine acceptance in the community: Key learning from the experiences of 734 frontline health workers.

You can access the full report here in French and in English. Short summaries are also available in three special issues of The Double Loop, the Foundation’s free Insights newsletter, now available in both English and French. The report, prefaced by Heidi Larson who leads the Vaccine Confidence Project, includes DOI to facilitate citation in academic research. (The Foundation uses a repository established and maintained by the Geneva-based CERN for this purpose.)

However, knowing that academic papers have (arguably) an average of three readers, we have a different aspiration for dissemination.

As a global community, we recognize the significance of local action to achieve the global goals.

The report documents vaccine confidence practices just weeks before the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines. It is grounded in the experience of 734 practitioners from local communities, districts, regions, and national teams, who developed case studies documenting a situation in which they were able to successfully lead individuals and groups toward better understanding and acceptance of the benefits of vaccines and vaccination.

Immunization staff from all levels of the health system became citizen scientists, active knowledge-makers drawing on their personal experience of a situation in which they successfully overcame the barriers to vaccine acceptance in the community.

Experiential learning offers a unique opportunity to discover unfiltered experiences and insights from thousands of people whose daily lives revolve around delivering immunization services. But what happens once experience has been shared? What is to be done with what we learn?

Sharing this report, we have found, has triggered remarkable dialogue and led to the co-creation of a steadily growing collection of new practices actually used to build vaccine confidence (as opposed to the many theoretical frameworks on the topic), submitted through our new Insights system. New stories and their analysis are being shared back with local practitioners and with TGLF’s Insights partners, fostering continuous learning that is an action imperative of a strong learning culture. (For Insights, we work with Bridges to Development, the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning (C3L), and the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins.)

In the coming weeks, we will be inviting 10,000 leaders of the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 to share this report to their colleagues, teams, and organizations (in both ministries of health and civil society organizations). They will be sharing back their own insights on how the findings can be used to improve demand for vaccines – and colleagues who listen to their presentation of the report will also be able to share back what they learn, connecting with each other through our Insights system.

Then, the Foundation’s Impact Accelerator will track if and how insights from this report are linked to reported positive outcomes, and we should be able to document this, at least in some cases. This will not only foster double-loop learning but also explicitly link learning to implementation and results.

In this way, local practitioners will be putting to use global knowledge grounded in their local experiences, for their own needs. We believe that this provides a complementary, more organic mechanism than current top-down processes for developing normative guidance driven by global assumptions and priorities.

As Kate O’Brien, WHO’s Director of Immunization, said during a recent Insights Live session: “The global role on immunization is actually to bring together everything that is known by people at the grassroots level. That’s where the action is. Global guidance is basically one means to share knowledge and expertise that’s coming from the grassroots level around the world with others who may not have had that experience yet.”

What we are doing with this report is part of a larger initiative to build the IA2030 Movement Knowledge to Action Hub. New knowledge produced by local practitioners will be available as both static and living documents that local and global practitioners can add their inputs to, at any time. This Hub will be launched at Teach to Reach 7 on 14 October 2022, with over 13,000 local practitioners registered for this event.

Image: Many paths to moving mountains. The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection.

October 12, 2022
Death of the knowledge bank

The complexity of the networks in which our organization operates is scaffolded by a corpus of mostly-unwritten, tacit knowledge and ‘ways of working’ that we learn mostly from our peers. It would be impossible to justify time to study even a fraction of the written corpus of policies, procedures, regulations and other instruments of bureaucracy that provides the legal and operational framework – and even that would not provide access to the tacit knowledge that we need. So we learn as we go from our colleagues. In some contexts, we may proceed by trial and error, making adjustments when we receive negative feedback.

When asked where we learn such knowledge, sources may remain apocryphal. We seldom reflect on where, when, how, and from whom we learn.

Relegating learning about operational complexity to the informal domain may seem to present a risk for the organization. In practice, we find that we do tend to learn what we need, when we need it as we work. It would be costly and time-consuming (i.e., impossible, as stated above) to achieve the same ends through formal training. Instead, the organization stands to benefit from recognition of the value of what is learned informally and learn to trust its validity.

The organization’s mission and mandate – as well as its ability to deliver on these – is the subject of much internal discussion in both the central organization (“headquarters”) and the network.

What do we do if a formal review finds limited change management capability in-house to keep pace with the rapid change in the external environment? We know that this is a critical gap because of the increased competition in the humanitarian and development world between the traditional service providers and new providers who are looking to enhance value-for-money offerings. Worse, other significant gaps may be found in our ability to drive strategically-guided programs on the ground, leading to diluted service delivery.

Such diagnosis leads to a refocus on knowledge production, circulation or exchange, but often misses the point that learning is what brings knowledge to life. The knowledge bank model is bankrupt: accumulation (or transport) of knowledge is a costly dead end, because the nature of knowledge itself has changed. It flows and becomes obsolete faster than ever. It is process, not product. Quality is in the ‘pipes’ that connect networked knowledge. Learning is in the network. That is why it is necessary but insufficient to retool in order to move knowledge throughout the world.

Why do organizations confronted with the same problem so consistently fail to consider that learning is knowledge-as-process? The blog posts in this series on learning strategy have consistently highlighted both the centrality of informal and incidental learning and its lack of recognition and near-invisibility to the organization. The more highly developed the ‘pipes’ of informal and incidental learning – or the more politically volatile the environment–, the less likely it becomes that the value of what is learned outside of formal contexts will be visible or acknowledged. And what cannot be seen is, of course, unlikely to be taken into consideration in times of change or reform.

Photo: Vintage Bank Vault (Brook Ward/flickr.com)

April 7, 2015
Thick knowledge

Toby Mundy on books as thick knowledge:

“[…] Books have a unique place in our civilisation […] because they are the only medium for thick descriptions of the world that human beings possess. By ‘thick’ description, I mean an extended, detailed, evidence-based, written interpretation of a subject. If you want to write a feature or blog or wikipedia entry, be it about the origins of the first world war; the authoritarian turn in Russia; or the causes and effects of the 2008 financial crisis, in the end you will have to refer to a book. Or at least refer to other people who have referred to books. Even the best magazine pieces and TV documentaries — and the best of these are very good indeed — are only puddle-deep compared with the thick descriptions laid out in books. They are ‘thin’ descriptions and the creators and authors of them will have referred extensively to books to produce their work.”

I’ve found myself going back to searching for well-written, comprehensive, in-depth books for sourcing both foundational and most-current knowledge. This notion of ‘thick knowledge’ makes a lot of sense.

Photo: Rainbow (Katey/flickr).

September 30, 2014
The End of Paper: Interview with Richard Padley of Semantico

At the 2010 Tools of Change for Publishing conference in Frankfurt, we met Richard Padley of Semantico. He spoke at the conference about mobile platforms from the perspective of publishers faced with multiple delivery models including apps and the web.

We started off our interview with Richard Padley by asking:

What does the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement mean to you?

So, is it the end of paper?

Even if I tell you that 30% of IFRC’s membership don’t have e-mail?

Many people seem to think that PDF is a usable digital format for publications. So, what’s wrong with PDF?

Even though EPUB is the basis for eBooks, in 2010 few people are familiar with this format. What’s right with EPUB?

The Kindle is a single-purpose device. It does one thing, and is meant to it well enough to convince people who love printed books to cross the digital divide. The iPad is a multi-purpose tablet. So, Kindle or iPad?

We hear about mobile platforms. What’s that about?

October 11, 2011
A few of my favorite excerpts from George Siemens’s Knowing Knowledge (2006)

My own practice (and no doubt yours) has been shaped by many different learning theorists. George Siemens, for me, stands out articulating what I felt but did not know how to express about the changing nature of knowledge in the Digital Age. Below I’ve compiled a few of my favorite excerpts from his book Knowing Knowledge, published in 2006, two years before he taught the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) with Alec Couros and Stephen Downes.

Learning has many dimensions. No one model or definition will fit every situation. CONTEXT IS CENTRAL. Learning is a peer to knowledge. To learn is to come to know. To know is to have learned. We seek knowledge so that we can make sense. Knowledge today requires a shift from cognitive processing to pattern recognition.

Construction, while a useful metaphor, fails to align with our growing understanding that our mind is a connection-creating structure. We do not always construct (which is high cognitive load), but we do constantly connect.

We learn foundational elements through courses…but we innovate through our own learning.

The changing nature of knowledge

The Achilles heel of existing theories rests in the pace of knowledge growth. All existing theories place processing (or interpretation) of knowledge on the individual doing the learning. This model works well if the knowledge flow is moderate. A constructivist view of learning, for example, suggests that we process, interpret, and derive personal meaning from different information formats. What happens, however, when knowledge is more of a deluge than a trickle? What happens when knowledge flows too fast for processing or interpreting?

Knowledge has broken free from its moorings, its shackles. Those, like Francis Bacon, who equate knowledge with power, find that the masses are flooding the pools and reservoirs of the elite. […] The filters, gatekeepers, and organizers are awakening to a sea of change that leaves them adrift, clinging to their old methods of creating, controlling, and distributing knowledge. […] Left in the wake of cataclysmic change are the knowledge creation and holding structures of the past. The ideologies and philosophies of reality and knowing—battle spaces of thought and theory for the last several millennia—have fallen as guides.

Libraries, schools, businesses—engines of productivity and society—are stretching under the heavy burden of change. New epistemological and ontological theories are being formed, as we will discuss shortly with connective knowledge. These changes do not wash away previous definitions of knowledge, but instead serve as the fertile top of multiple soil layers. […]

Or consider email in its earlier days—many printed out a paper copy of emails, at least the important ones, and filed them in a file cabinet. Today we are beginning to see a shift with email products that archive and make email searchable and allow individuals to apply metadata at point of use (tagging).

Knowledge has to be accessible at the point of need. Container-views of knowledge, artificially demarcated (courses, modules) for communication, are restrictive for this type of flow and easy-access learning.

Everything is going digital. The end user is gaining control, elements are decentralizing, connections are being formed between formerly disparate resources and fields of information, and everything seems to be speeding up.

“Know where” and “know who” are more important today that knowing what and how.

Once flow becomes too rapid and complex, we need a model that allows individuals to learn and function in spite of the pace and flow.

We need to separate the learner from the knowledge they hold. It is not really as absurd as it sounds. Consider the tools and processes we currently use for learning. Courses are static, textbooks are written years before actual use, classrooms are available at set times, and so on.

The underlying assumption of corporate training and higher education centers on the notion that the world has not really changed.

But it has. Employees cannot stay current by taking a course periodically. Content distribution models (books and courses) cannot keep pace with information and knowledge growth. Problems are becoming so complex that they cannot be contained in the mind of one individual—problems are held in a distributed manner across networks, with each node holding a part of the entire puzzle. Employees require the ability to rapidly form connections with other specialized nodes (people or knowledge objects). Rapidly creating connections with others results in a more holistic view of the problem or opportunity, a key requirement for decision making and action in a complex environment.

How do we separate the learner from the knowledge? By focusing not on the content they need to know (content changes constantly and requires continual updating), but on the connections to nodes which continually filter and update content.

Here is what the connectivism implementation cycle looks like as a mind map. (Click on the image to download the PDF).

Source: George Siemens, Knowing Knowledge (2006).

Image: TEDxNYED

July 19, 2006