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Conversational Learning: An Experiential Approach to Knowledge Creation

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This 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.

Experiential learning is something we understand or should understand. We learn from experience and this has been well documented in prior work on experiential learning. Collaborative learning strategies, simulations, games, and apprenticeships are all about experience. In this groundbreaking book, the authors provide the first referenced text on conversation as learning. If you really want to understand the experience of learning in conversation, I highly encourage you the read this outstanding book. The authors provide specific case studies of the concepts that they provide and their work is well referenced. This is one of those books that I have a hundred or so references tabbed for regular use. I refer to this work on a regular basis. Very powerful.