I’ve been an autodidact all my life. My learning programs have had little to do with what I was fed in school or in the approved training programs of the various places I’ve worked. In fact, when I was with the Department of Indian Affairs, I tried to initiate a new learning program to foster leadership. I advocated giving every employee their $800 a year training allotment and allowing them to spend it on whatever learning program they wanted. If employees chose to take the government sanctioned filing training, that’s fine. If people wanted to spend the money on a 13 week cabinet making course, no problem. As long as the money was spoent on a learning program, it was fair game.

Naturally, you can imagine that the powers that be in the federal government were a little nervous about the notion of public servants spending taxpayer’s dollars on cabinet making classes, but my point was a bigger one. It is in learning about something we are passionate for that we develop the capacity to make connections to the world of work. We become better thinkers when we can connect the experience of learning to the rest of our lives. Despite the fact that the Government of Canada has a pretty good management development centre, it’s a tragedy that the vast majority of career public servants to go through life with the the only learning taking place in labs where they study contract management or learn how to write replies to letters sent to their Ministers. In that respect, I think that we are not serving our public servants, or those that work in our corporations, within our society. Connect learning to real passion and you have employees who suddenly discover that there is something that they care about. Triggering that reaction leads to them finding other ways to bring an autodidactic approach to the workplace.

And this is the time for that. We are living in an era that I fantatsized about 25 years ago when I first saw the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Even as a 10 year old boy I knew right away that the Hitchhiker’s Guide was the thing I wanted. A little handheld device that contained all of the knowledge known about the galaxy. Twenty five years later, I’m hooked up on the web to a fat pipe, I can carry a PDA and learn just about anything i want to. I can even take a course at MIT.

All of this is to illustrate that we live in an era where networks can serve autodidacts beautifully. Not just data networks either, but social networks, communities of practice and learning exchanges. We suddenly have the capacity, each one of us, to live in a world of rapid change, adjusting our learning styles to suit the needs of our lives:

It’s a tragedy that we still rely on classrooms full of bureaucrats doing paperwork as the paragon of corporate learning.