Which came first: the content or the dialogue?

by Alan Nelson

Yesterday evening I attended the launch of an ACCA research report called Narratives: Are they immaterial? The researchers had interviewed a sample of analysts to ask them how useful they found the narrative sections of companies’ annual accounts. The answer was a pretty unanimous “not at all”. It seems that while companies produce in many cases hundreds of pages of narrative explanation, the analysts simply turn to the numbers and focus on them. The session took the form of a debate, and a lively one it was too, with all the speakers providing a stimulating perspective on why this is happening.

After the formal proceedings I bumped into Brigitte Crawford, who works for ACCA, creating innovative new learning products. She was at the event because she was using it as a guinea pig for a new idea for providing CPD to ACCA members. Brigitte had arranged for the event to be filmed. Today they are editing it and on Monday it will be live on the ACCA site. I wouldn’t normally be very interested in this. I am not a big fan of videoed lectures delivered to your browser, but Brigitte’s project has a twist. The different speakers’ contributions will each be viewable separately and then users will be encouraged to post their own comments and thereby contribute to the dialogue. The debate that had to be cut short on the night can now carry on until it is exhausted.

Although this idea of producing highly topical content very quickly after an event is entirely different from our approach to producing much more interactive experiences focusing on topics that are less time sensitive, it does at its heart have the same recognition that it isn’t the content on its own that is interesting; it is the dialogue that it provokes within the community.

That isn’t to say that the content isn’t important. Without it there would nothing to talk about. It is just that we shouldn’t any longer be thinking solely about the elegant presentation of ideas, but about the way they can provoke and embrace the community of learners’ own contributions. Of course for the next group of learners the dialogue becomes the content provoking the old question, “Which came first…..?”

I wish ACCA every success with this sortie into Web 2.0.