Your favorite 2009 posts on Internet Time Blog

eLearning is not a big cost-cutter

Corporations are flocking to eLearning for all the wrong reasons. It’s cheaper: no travel, no facilities cost, no instructor salaries. This sort of fanciful thinking tripped up eLearning ten years ago. MORE

Informal Learning 2.0

In the world of business, the era of networks is crowding out the Industrial Age. Network connections are replacing rigidity with flexibility, penetrating internal boundaries and silos and obliterating the walls that have separated businesses from their customers.

Networks reduce transfer costs to zero, enabling companies to focus on what they do best while outsourcing what others can do better. Networks also speed things up, often at a terrifying rate, making the corporate world unpredictable. In sum, networks are ushering in new ways of doing business. Corporate approaches to learning have to change, as well.  MORE

Free chapters from Implementing eLearning

Seven years ago, Lance Dublin and I wrote a book entitled Implementing eLearning. The cover explained…

Here Is How To:

• Manage the Change to E-Learning
• Successfully Market to Learners
• Create an Implementation Strategy

We wrote that for eLearning to work, you needed to set the stage with change management and sell the stakeholders with the methods of consumer marketing. The message is timeless. People still buy copies of Implementing eLearning today.

For years, we’ve offered excerpts from the rough draft of the book for free. MORE

More Human Than Human

The future is people, not technology

My last column in CLO called for the abolition of corporate training departments. Now some instructors and traditional instructional designers see me as a job threat. They needn’t worry. Enlightened e-learning requires more people, not fewer.

Ten years ago, venture capital firms issued lengthy reports explaining why e-learning would take the world by storm. Their underlying economic argument was cost-cutting: less travel, fewer facilities and no more salary expense for instructors. It was a classic industrial age proposition: Replace humans with machines. That first round of e-learning largely failed for precisely this reason. You can’t remove the humans from learning. MORE

Not Your Father’s ROI

Today’s networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created.

The industrial age has run out of steam. Look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler. We are witnessing the death throes of management models that have outlived their usefulness.

The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas). Look at Google and Cisco. MORE

Thoughts following April Learntrends

Yesterday, Learntrends hosted a series of online conversations on boosting the performance of organizations through learning.

Our goal was honest dialog among as many members as possible. No commercials. No presentations. Few or no slides. Often, we threw three or four great people into an online fishbowl and let the conversation go where it would. At other times, participants simply talked about whatever was on their minds, with a host and time cop occasionally nudging the conversation back to the theme of improving the process of learning in organizations. MORE

Streams, not blogs?

I don’t know how my friend and colleague Jane Hart does it. In addition to implementing social learning systems for universities and corporations, she leads workshops on social learning and somehow finds time to maintain the most useful learning site on the net, the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. Among other things, the Center maintains a list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning. The list compiles the Top 10 lists of 195 learning professionals. It’s a fantastic resource. MORE

Ten years after

“If you peer inside an organization in 10 years time and you look to how workplace learning is being supported by that organization, what will you see? What will the mix of Push vs. Pull Learning; Formal vs. Informal supported by the organization? Are there training departments? What are they doing? How big are they as compared to today? What new departments will be responsible for parts of workplace learning? What will current members of training departments be doing in 10 years?” MORE