OK, these skills are not actually “new” –  they’ve always been present – but perhaps they have not always been as visible as they should have been, as Oscar Berg explains in The collaboration pyramid (or iceberg). But, as businesses transform into social businesses, the social workplace is going to become more and more reliant on these skills. Read more →

Following my recent post on the case for a non-training approach (NTA) to workplace learning and the launch of my NTA website, I’ve received quite a bit feedback and read a number of blog posts and comments about it. So I thought I would plot all these reactions on the learning technology adoption curve that my Internet Time Alliance colleague, Harold Jarche and I produced last year (which is an adaptation of the one originally produced by Geoffrey Moore). Read more →

The Training Department (aka the L&D dept) has traditionally focused on designing, developing, delivering and managing instruction – in the form of courses, workshops, e-learning and other training events.  In  fact “a course” in some form or other has now become  the de facto solution to any performance problem in an organisation – despite the fact that many of my Internet Time Alliance colleagues (and others) have spoken about its inadequacies in today’s world, and that courses have little impact on performance. Read more →

Article written for e-Learning Age magazine, November 2011

With the emergence of new social media tools, the word “Social” is being prefixed to old words to form new terms like “Social Business” and “Social Media Marketing”, and of course we now see the increasing use of the term “Social Learning”. Read more →

In Part One  of this series of blog postings, I asked the question:

“As business is becoming more social and we are using new social tools to work collaboratively with one another, do we really need another set of social tools specifically for learning?” Read more →

We are hearing a lot about new social learning tools and  platforms that are becoming available – but do you really need them in the workplace?

This article was written for the E-Learning Council, and first appeared on 10 October 2011

Although we learn every day, in everything we do, whether it is in what we read,  watch or listen to, or in the conversations and discussions we have with other people, at some time or other people started believing that the only important learning happens in a formal setting, e.g. in a school classroom or a university lecture hall. Read more →

On Wednesday I spoke at the World Of Learning 2011 conference in the session on Harnessing the potential of social learning.  My message was the same as usual (and you can see my presentation here) that social learning is not about forcing people to participate in online learning communities as part of formal training, but about encouraging and supporting teams to build their own group spaces to support one another more informally in the workflow.

I’ve written a few postings recently (notably Social Learning doesn’t mean what you think it does) where I have tried to show how the fundamental changes in how businesses are operating, require a fundamental change in how the L&D function needs to view workplace learning.  I suggested this means a move from a “Command and Control” approach to an “Encourage and Engage” approach to Workplace Learning. Read more →