Is your thinking pragmatic and systematic?

Nowadays, development organizations are increasingly compelled to show that their programmes produce meaningful and lasting changes for their beneficiaries.

However, such “impacts” depend on many factors, such as behavioural change by those concerned or the relationships among them. This makes assessing development impacts problematic; yet many organizations strive to measure results that go far beyond the objectives of their programmes.

Outcome Mapping[1] offers not only a methodology[2] for monitoring and evaluation but also planning systems that enable organizations to document, learn from, and report on their achievements. It is designed to help with understanding an organization’s results, while recognizing that contributions by other players are essential to achieving the sustainable, large-scale improvements in human and ecological well-being toward which the organization is working. These contributions are planned and assessed in terms of their influence on the partners with whom the organization is working to effect change. In essence, development is accomplished by, and for, people. This is the central concept of Outcome Mapping.

Enhancing learning for Effectiveness

“Enhancing Learning for Effectiveness”  is Train4Dev’s new methodological guide on design, implementation and evaluation of Joint Learning Event. It was presented in Brussels during the last annual meeting of the network and is the result of a truly collaborative process. The assignment was coordinated by the Turin Centre and we could count on the strong commitment of the team that brought this guide into existence: the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, GIZ, UNDP, UNSSC, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, FAO, CEF, and Lux-Development.

The wealth of knowledge, experience and tools embedded within the Train4Dev network, was pulled together or emerged from the hidden corners of complex institutional structures. It took time and patience and endless efforts to ensure that the guide would meet the required quality standards and suit the need for strengthening the learning methodologies, as identified by the network. The aim is to contribute to the shift of Joint learning events from traditional top-down training to purposeful participatory learning events where participants share as well as acquire knowledge, compare and enhance their practices, and rely on process facilitators, not only on subject matter experts. Only after this guide will have been used by a large group of training managers and trainers will we know whether this demanding objective will be achieved.

It is hoped that this small brick in the wall of joint learning for development will contribute to the noble mandate of the network to “add value as facilitators of joint learning, in areas of high priority for aid and development effectiveness”.

Download the guide !

Robin Poppe

E-Learning Africa in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

ITC-ILO will be represented through DELTA in the upcoming E-Learning Africa conference, held in Dar es Salaam this year. DELTA will host an interactive knowledge sharing session which focuses on the rapid growth of Web2.0 technologies within the context of different projects in developing countries (with cases from World Bank Institute, International Training Centre of the ILO, UNHCR and FAO). The session will highlight how these types of technologies can become an important driver of innovation in learning and knowledge sharing from different perspectives.
E-learning Africa is the biggest network event in Africa for developing e-learning capacities in Africa.  Feel free to consult the entire conference programme.

Gamestorming. Do you want to be more innovative?

Practical and inspiring guides with innovative and participatory learning and knowledge sharing methods are always interesting to read. “Gamestorming, a playbook for innovators, rulebreakers, and change“, written by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo is a good illustrative example. The entire instructional cycle of a meaningful learning or working event is documented in a very visual and pragmatical way. It moves beyond the usual participatory methodologies such as ‘fishbowl‘, ‘world cafe‘ and ‘open space‘ and introduces you to a variety of new techniques from ‘bodystorming’ until ‘spectrum mapping’. The book is also structured along the cyclical nature of an event from opening until closing and shows you the different creative processes that occur during an event (diverging, emerging and converging). For facilitators and trainers it is handy because the methods are written in a way that you can apply them immediately on-the-job. The book has a virtual extension on http://www.gogamestorm.com/. Any other must reads in this area of participatory learning and knowledge sharing?

Mobile learning (2)

After introducing the mobile learning theme in this blog, DELTA started to explore how mobile learning could create an added value for learning at the Centre. Therefore we will update you in the upcoming months of the MyCOOP mobile project. The MyCOOP training package is about the management of agricultural cooperatives for cooperative managers and trainers. DELTA is exploring where mobile technologies could enrich the current existing training material. Mobile phones are widely used withing this target group and learning and training could be made more accessible by exploring this mobile track.

The exploration will tackle different important dimensions. What about the technology and infrastructure we can use for this? In this context it is interesting to refer to  new mobile for development report of UNICEF. Not only technological insights will be needed, more and more the pedagogical and didactical strategies that are needed to launch successful mobile learning are important. A good opportunity to explore these dimensions together with a range of mobile learning experts is to participate in the Massive Online Course on Mobile Learning. Click here if you want to learn more about this initiative.

Towards a new organization ?

social network analysis

Knowledge is located in social networks, therefore it is important to better understand them. Social networks are nodes of individuals, groups, organisations or related systems which are connected by types of interdependency. Social network analysis is an instrument to map these connections and visualizes formal and informal connections and knowledge flows between people, groups and organisations.

a visual overview of learning methodologies @DELTA @ITC-ILO

Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management and Knowledge Sharing are re-current themes that emphasise the importance we put on “the learning organisation” (Peter Senge). DELTA is currently involved in several interesting Knowledge Management Initiatives. Last year we started to give input in the KM series of United Nations Staff College “Think UN, act smart”. This resulted in a series of interesting workshops  facilitated by Staff College and  Geoff Parcell and Chris Collison.  (Learning to Fly, Practical knowledge management for leading and learning organisations ). This year we will collaborate with the the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights on a KS toolkit that will institutionally enhance the use of knowledge sharing methodologies and technologies. This collaboration will also result in a tailor-made workshop titled: “From knowledge management towards knowledge sharing”.

Collaborative writing. The world of wiki’s.

Writing together in team on an article, a publication, a project or a toolkit, it more and more happens in the wiki way. If wiki still sounds chinese for you have first a look at wiki’s in plain English.  Almost ten  years ago the wiki way of building collaboratively knowledge started to grow slowly with Wikipedia as it’s most successful example. Now more and more organisations rely on wiki’s to support the collaborative writing process. Avoiding endless e-mail-conversations with word-documents that lost track of versions, the wiki-approach allows groups easily to work together in one document just by clicking the edit-button and start the writing process.