To get people to learn, you must give them a reason to care

I stumbled across this recent blog post about "Learning as Care" by Nick Shackleton-Jones recently.  In the post, Shackleton-Jones makes the point that the most important part of getting anyone to learn something is getting them to care.  Here are some highlights from his post:

• if people really cared about something we would have no work to do. And if we can't make people care, then we have usually done no work
• we disseminate information without giving people a reason to care
• we fail to provide learning resources to people who do care
• don't tell people what is important, tell them?why, tell the story
• care is the central mechanism at the heart of all human learning - it governs both how we store information and how we subsequently use it

This is very timely information for me as we prepare to find new ways to get staff to manage their paper documents properly, a topic that our surveys show staff care about, but are intensely frustrated by.