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 →

Nigel Paine recently produced a very good ten-minute video on The Learning Explosion. Nigel used one of my diagrams in his presentation and this motivated me to explain it in a bit more detail. 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 →

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.

Yesterday, in my first posting on this topic, I showed how “social learning” is not just about a new training trend or about adding social media into the “blend” or acquiring the latest Social Learning Management System, but a fundamental change in how we need to view workplace learning.  And that in order stay in tune with new ways of working and learning, the L&D function needs to move from a “Command and Control” approach to one that I called “Encourage and Engage”. Read more →

I was recently involved in a discussion about 21st Century learning skills in one of the LinkedIn Groups. It got me thinking about a piece I’d written for TrainingZone a few months ago titled ‘What does your ideal L&D team look like in 2010?’ I’ve posted that article here, with some changes and updates. Read more →

There have been millions of words written and spoken about ‘informal’ and social learning over the past few years.

Very few of us would argue with the proposition that a lot of organisational learning and development activity is sub-optimal to the extent that it provides little value to participants and their organisations. Read more →

Charles Jennings argues that the adage ‘access to knowledge is power’ is more fitting in today’s information-swamped world.

Two of my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance, Jane Hart and Charles Jennings just returned from speaking at the Learning Technologies conference in London.

The conference program would lead you to assume that the Learning Technologies conference would be a hotbed of social and informal learning. Read more →