Sharing for better preservation: a strategy for learning!

It can be useful to formalize and document the work done during the year to capitalize and move forward. What if you went so far as to share this documentation work ? Give it away? Far from impoverishing you, this approach will really help you progress !

Let's look together at some of the elements that help defend this point of view.

Sort

Sorting through the past year's projects or activities requires assessing what has been most fruitful and worth pursuing further or what has been most enjoyable (we're allowed to indulge ourselves, too). This sorting will actually break down into two steps :

1. The evaluation, where we will estimate the relevance of the projects or actions carried out during the year ;
2. The direction that one will give for the continuation of his professional activity by choosing to extend only the most relevant projects and abandon the others !

These two elements are essential in a lifelong learning to orient oneself and progress continuously.

Document

Once the various projects are sorted, what was done is analyzed and documented. The idea is then to make explicit the context, the objectives sought, the approach implemented and the results. If we want to go to the end of the process, we have to document all the projects, the successes as well as the failures, in order to capitalize on the mistakes so as not to repeat them. In this respect, the 'failconf' highlight the failures and the way in which we were able to bounce back afterwards. It is an extremely rich approach that deserves to be applied and exploited in many contexts, both professional and personal.

Moreover, documenting will force one to formalize the different aspects of a project and help one to take a step back. The SOLO taxonomy, formalized by Biggs and Collis, seems to me in this respect to be quite inspiring to characterize the richness of description of a project. It is characterized by 5 levels that we can transpose in our context of documentation of a project as follows :

• Prestructural : the project is not understood, the elements presented are deficient ;
• Unistructural : some elements of the project are well presented ;
• Multistructural : all of the project elements are well presented and documented but treated separately without emphasizing overall coherence ;
• Relational : the project is presented as a whole and coherent ;
• Expanded : the project is 'modeled' so that it can be easily compared, generalized or transposed.

Share

Sharing your production will raise the bar. Indeed, sharing implies being read, which naturally commits to raising the quality of the shared production. This is seen as a challenge that pushes one to aim for the higher levels of the SOLO taxonomy (relational and extended abstract levels). And the first beneficiary of this increased requirement is the author of the work !

In addition, sharing allows for feedback on the production made available. This can take the form of recognition or thanks, but also additions, links to other resources made available, ...

Finally, it allows you to become part of a network of professionals who are asking the same questions and moving in the same direction.

These different interactions will, over time, help to orient oneself and support motivation.

And begin again ...

This approach is a source of real learning, but it is also a strong lever for developing self-efficacy (confidence in one's ability to succeed). These two elements are effective drivers to support the commitment in a professional development process. It can then be interesting to enter into a dynamic of 'continuous' documentation. You can use a blog for this, but if the written word puts you off, don't hesitate to try other formats: audio, video, graphics, ...

Analyze

Now that the process is clarified, it is interesting to question its effectiveness. Rather than presenting a theoretical viewpoint, I propose to describe the learnings I gained from writing this article :

• It gave me the opportunity to dive back into some reading on self-learning and to clarify some definitions;
• It also made me aware of the relevance of the SOLO taxonomy to evaluate the richness of such a documentation or project analysis work.
• Finally, it was an opportunity to reiterate a point about evaluating a work: When one is introduced to this approach, the first idea of evaluation is to look at the production and assess its quality or relevance (and the SOLO taxonomy can be useful). In a second step, one can confront the theoretical approach presented here with the actual activity. One then evaluates the process.
• Finally, one can seek to identify the learning that results from this activity by looking at the purpose, which is what I propose in this analysis part. These three levels of evaluation are presented by Cégep Sainte Foy (reference below) in the context of a group evaluation but can be adapted to any learning situation.

Here you go, you know the process,  you may have some time to get started : go ahead ! Share ! You will see: producing and giving such documents allows you to capitalize on your learning over time !

References

Pedagogy, Andragogy & Heutagogy, J. Dubois, 2014 (visited June 23, 2019)
https://prodageo.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/pedagogie-andragogie-et-heutagogie/

The failconf, collective (visited June 23, 2019) http://thefailcon.com/

Self-directed learning and distance education, A. Jézégou, 2008, (visited June 23, 2019)
https://www.cairn.info/revue-distances-et-savoirs-2008-3-page-343.htm

The SOLO Taxonomy, Biggs, (visited June 23, 2019)
https://wiki.teluq.ca/wikitedia/index.php/Taxonomie_SOLO

An illustration of individual and group assessment of learning in large-scale teamwork, CEGEP de Ste Foy, (visited June 23, 2019)
https://sites.cegep-ste-foy.qc.ca/fileadmin/user_upload/_imported/fileadmin/groups/7/Babillard/4.Evaluer/4.EQ.1_Illustration_eval_ind_collective_apprentissages_equipe.pdf

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