DJALCHEMI

Dick Moore on Agile Learning, Agile Software Development and the Mobile Internet

Dick Moore was, until a week or two ago, Director of Technology at Ufi/learndirect — I've known him since his days at Doncaster and Sheffield Colleges, and then at a Santa Monica dotcom. We started talking about Agile Learning shortly after my last post about it, and I quickly felt there were enough interesting ideas in the conversation to make it worth developing and sharing. So I suggested doing an interview with Dick, and sent him a few questions to think about…

A few days ago, I received a comprehensive document with Dick's thoughtful replies. Hence what follows is as much a 'guest post' as an interview, though we did have a follow-up chat. Dick has a deep understanding of tech infrastructure and methods, so the first section is his take on the possible mappings between Agile Software Development and Agile Learning. The later sections weave together Dick's answers to my questions with some additional material from our chat.

Dick's blog is at ToolsAndTaxonomy.com and you can mail him at dmoore [at] MooreAnswers dot co dot uk. [Update, 15 July 2010: Dick has now posted his version of this interview, so have a look and check for comments there as well.

I'm interested in doing a series of interviews like this, with people who have different contexts for, and angles on, Agile Learning. If you'd like to be interviewed, please get in touch.

Agile Learning and Agile Software Development

What do we mean by Agile Learning? In software development, the 'agile' movement was as a reaction against large scale development projects governed by a monolithic organisational standard perceived to be overly bureaucratic, costly and slow for what is often small scale development. Not all development is suitable for such an approach in much the same way that not all learning and assessment could be considered suitable for an agile approach (though there may be elements within large learning programmes that might benefit from agile methods to better reflect real world situations).