So you’re now a social business?

You are engaging with social media for marketing and customer support. You have also put in place a social intranet, with activity streams for sharing information, collaboration tools for work teams and document management systems that include social tags and easy sharing. Now the hard work begins. However, this usually occurs just after the software vendors have provided the initial training and you are now on your own as an organization. You’re ready to be a social business; everyone is connected, but few know what to do. 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 →

Business is Falling Behind

Business organizations are lagging reality. The 21st century is radically different from what came before and yet most businesses act as if nothing has changed.

Half of the adult population of the United States uses social media, up from 5% a scant six years. 750 million people converse on Facebook. A couple of hundred of us were blogging a dozen years ago; today 160 million people blog. Yet most corporations are  reluctant to “take the risk” on social media. Read more →

Jay Cross is a champion of informal learning, working smarter, and systems thinking. His calling is to help business people improve their performance on the job and satisfaction in life. Known as the first person to use the term eLearning on the web, Cross is the former head of the eLearning Forum and currently chairs the Internet Time Alliance, a brain trust of six thought leaders in the fields of social and informal learning, who help companies boost their collective intelligence and profitability through networks. Read more →

“Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy“ - Article #7 of The Cluetrain Manifesto, 1999.

The Net, especially working and learning in networks, subverts many of the hierarchies we have developed over hundreds of years. Formal education is one example, as shown in this excellent article by Cathy Davidson: Read more →

Think back to one great personal learning experience you’ve had. It may have been in childhood when you realized you could ride your bicycle without training wheels or a parent’s guiding hand. Or it may have been when you finally understood the basics of solving quadratic equations. It could have happened more recently – for example when you were involved in a debrief after a tough project and realized through the process that the project had taught you some very useful new skills. 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 →

Network learning, or personal knowledge management (PKM), is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past, self-directed learning may have involved keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting on, or even remixing information. We can also store information for easy retrieval as we need it. Read more →

On April 27, 2011, Clark Quinn and I kicked off a meeting of the Chief Learning Officer Executive Network at Symantec in Mountain View. The Executive Networks people took notes; here are the main points from my presentation. Read more →