#WorkingOutLoud on Learning in the Age of Generative AI

Tomorrow I will deliver a new body of work at the World of Learning Conference, in a session called ‘Learning in the Age of Generative AI’. I’m using a broad sequence of ideas that chart the major shift from codified and structured learning, through to distributed and Social Learning , in parallel with the emergence of Generative AI and some of the key impacts and fractures of these new technologies. I thought I would share the broad narrative today as I prepare for this session.

In the first part I will situate Organisational Learning against some of the key shifts we see in the context of Organisations: this includes the new work on capability (a shift to collective capability) and the learning science work on Social Metacognition , as well as key shifts in the nature of knowledge and a rebalancing of power from formal through to social systems. The piece on knowledge includes a reflection on the nature of ‘truth’, and questions of validation and trust.

I’ll then explore aspects of constraint, or why formal systems struggle to react and adapt to the new contexts of learning, ranging from dogmatic belief in legacy approaches, through to the ideas that our future organisations will be Socially Dynamic, not structural through systems alone. The conclusion of this is that we see learning within our Organisations as increasingly dialogic, increasingly socially constructed and moderated, and becoming fully contextual (through distributed, adaptive, and individualised technologies, both formally owned and socially accessed).

This takes me to the third and final section, which in some ways is the most fragile of it, drawing upon the ideas I shared recently in ‘An ontology of havoc ’, the impacts of GenAI. The four themes in this were the proliferation of ‘Dialogic Engines’, the impact of ‘Agentic Retrieval’ (autonomous contextualisation at point of use), Trans-Disciplinarity (the breakdown of codified structures), and finally the Primacy of Sense Making and the creation of meaning. All four of these really relate to seismic shifts in the landscape of learning – not simply the structures through which learning is delivered, but rather the fundamental landscapes of knowledge and mechanisms by which we learn, and share that learning.

This is an imperfect story, and deliberately so. Mainly I am rehearsing ideas, and seeking connectivity. I don’t simply want an easy story, but rather a useful one. Conference sessions can be tricky: I went to a great session on AI and learning last month, but it was great because it was simply, and I cannot really think of a single thing I could do with the story I was given. These sessions need to be challenging, but also open up clear spaces that we can explore within.

When we wrote ‘Engines of Engagement ’, we deliberately sought to avoid the obvious and easy narratives. In this work I am trying to do the same: not simply to comment upon aspects of the immediate and obvious, but rather to synthesise that into a useful narrative of state change: how is the context of Organisational learning shifting, and what may we consider doing about this?