Conversational Learning: An Experiential Approach to Knowledge Creation Review

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Conversational Learning: An Experiential Approach to Knowledge Creation ReviewThis is not a traditional edited volume with editors and contributors. Instead, the editors appear as authors in various combinations, with a few other people making occasional appearances. The man behind the curtain is David Kolb, author of an influential 1984 book on experiential learning, and professor in a long-standing graduate seminar based on conversational learning. The other authors are his current or former students, and his wife.
The first half of the book consists of a lot of chapters of literature review. These are mostly sterile: Smith says X, Jones says Y. There's little effective argument in this part of the book, and ironically little conversation among the literatures being reviewed. Most of these reviews are surprisingly abstract for people concerned about concrete learning experiences. The literatures, and the authors, spend a lot of time classifying things, or saying that something is characterized by five or seven features. These classifications tend to be made by assertion, with less use of evidence than you might think.
Alice Kolb's account of David Kolb's conversational learning seminar in practice came as a breath of fresh air, and inaugurates a group of chapters that tell the stories of particular conversational learning settings. Most settings are found in traditional university classrooms but they include online learning environments and professional conferences. The authors are not as self-critical as I would have liked, but their case studies nonetheless provide useful ideas for other people who might want to try these techniques.
The case studies are not well-grounded in the theoretical reviews from the first half of the book; surprisingly, their typologies tended to differ from the theoretical classifications. There's something wrong when that happens. My non-expert judgment is that the practice is more persuasive than the theory. Certainly the chapters on practice were more interesting than the chapters on theory.
Conversational Learning: An Experiential Approach to Knowledge Creation OverviewDespite conflicting belief systems and other divisive problems, people can still learn from each other to create new knowledge. The medium is conversation. This challenging new book asserts that business conversations can be seen as social experiences through which we discover new ways of seeing the world, destroying the barriers between us. When this occurs, new knowledge can emerge or be developed. How can people learn from their differences, rather than be divided by them? One way is by creating conversational spaces--areas where conversation occurs. The authors show how such spaces are created, maintained, and enhanced, and how they are used to transform different interpretations and perspectives into new common understandings. With illustrations and case studies, the authors demonstrate the practical value of conversational learning in diverse organizational settings. Emphasis is shifted from techniques that are essentially insensitive to different contexts, attitudes, and beliefs, focusing instead on a theory of learning that is more social and interactive. This remarkable new source of explanatory theory validates an intensely pragmatic way to help organizations get people talking to one another, thereby advancing the well being of the organizations and those within them.

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