I’m regularly trying to do two things: explore mobile capabilities, and get folks to think more broadly about how we can support performance in the organization.  I was asked to flesh out a proposed title for a stage at the upcoming mLearnCon, and thought about trying to map the 4C’s of mobile to the major categories of mobile work opportunities.  It’s a slightly different take than my previous meta-mobile post where I looked at performance support, formal learning, and meta-learning. Read more →

I’ve been using the tag ‘learning experience design strategy’ as a way to think about not taking the same old approaches of events über ales.  The fact of the matter is that we’ve quite a lot of models and resources to draw upon, and we need to rethink what we’re doing.

The problem is that it goes far beyond just a more enlightened instructional design, which of course we need.  We need to think of content architectures, blends between formal and informal, contextual awareness, cross-platform delivery, and more.  It involves technology systems, design processes, organizational change, and more.  We also need to focus on the bigger picture. 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 →

Working smarter is the key to sustainability and continuous improvement. Knowledge work and learning to work smarter are becoming indistinguishable. The accelerating rate of change in business forces everyone in every organization to make a choice: learn while you work or become obsolete. Read more →

Odds are your organization is failing your learners in a variety of predictable but inexcusable ways.

Higher ground

I don’t talk much about training or learning these days.

Just because you train people doesn’t mean they learn.

Learning is higher ground than training, but learning is not enough to make sure the job gets done. Read more →

This is the extended abstract for the presentation I’m leaving today to give in Berlin at Online Educa on mobile learning on Dec 2.

Increasingly, workers are mobile.  When we look not only at field-deployed individuals, but also those who occasionally must travel to meetings, make site-visits, are away at conferences and workshops, or even are commuting, the number of mobile workers can be considered from half to most of the workforce. When we consider how many have a mobile device of some sort, and that these devices are increasingly powerful, we have a big opportunity to have a business impact. Read more →

My problem with the formal models of instructional design (e.g. ADDIE for process), is that most are based upon a flawed premise.  The premise is that the world is predictable and understandable, so that we can capture the ‘right’ behavior and train it.  Which, I think, is a naive assumption, at least in this day and age. Read more →

The opportunity we now have is to use technology to move from an event-based learning model that we know to be ineffective, to a more distributed and contextualized environment that elegantly spans the continuum from formal learning to performance support. And this is not science fiction – we have the tools we need now. Even if we didn’t, we should be preparing our thinking for this capability. Read more →

We’re in a new age. Organizations can no longer be dependent on training to meet their learning needs. When things changed slowly, we could train people and trust that they could perform or be coached to do their jobs. That day has passed. The steady acceleration of information creation and advances in technology has reached a critical point, and we have been thrust into a realization that our old models of management cannot cope. The chaotic underpinnings of the world have been unmasked, and continual adaptation is the new status quo. Read more →