Learning and "Community", Part 2

After a week vacation, part of which was in Las Vegas, I'm moderately well rested and ready to head into the last bit of our fiscal year planning.

I finished "Groundswell" on vacation and have started "Wikinomics" so I can start wrapping my head around some of the other ramifications of peer production and collaboration.  I feel that this must impact the way we learn.  In my experience with team software development, the collaborative environment was invaluable and where I learned a lot of helpful skills.  It's not quite like mentoring, but it can have that kind of tone with some teams.

I have a colleague with whom I discuss a lot of these kinds of topics (he has been part of the University of Washington's Masters program I mentioned in an earlier post.  As we discuss and brainstorm about technical training, learning styles, social networking, peer production, community et al. it can feel like mentoring, but it feels a lot more invigorating than that.

Is there a way that learning and technical training can really be invigorating?  Is it confined to a kind of experience, a specific instructor, an environment, or what?  I know that I enter that timeless place sometimes when I'm learning, but other times when 5 minutes feels more like a week.  I try to notice what the particulars about the experience are:

• Environment - simple things like too hot or cold, comfort of the chair (but not too comfortable), lighting, and ambience.
• Subject - Sometimes I can be completely engrossed by the technology and then, an hour later (same tech) it is totally uninteresting.
• Instructor - As I mentioned in an earlier post, this could be a person, a Webcast, a book/article/blog/newsgroup, e-learning or some combination.
• Being -  That is, am I tired, sick, distracted, eating, etc.

I'll keep paying attention and let you know what else I discover.  Let me know if you discover something that helps or hinders you.