*If you are not reflecting, you are not learning. Here are some things I learned from in the past six months.
I bought a Flip HD
The Flip UltraHD camcorder is a breakthrough learning device. Two hours of high-quality video from a cam that slides into your pocket. All for less than $200. Here’s a sample:
I continued to experiment with learning video. I prepared these videos to show at Online Educa.
- Verna Allee describes Value Networks
- Mark Oehlert discusses Identity and Authority
- Ellen Wagner summarizes the Future of Learning Technology
- John Foster talks about People Policy at IDEO
- Kevin Wheeler and Murray Christensen laugh at Talent Management
- Eileen Clegg explains Visual Learning
- Michael Allen tells about a futuristic, object-oriented authoring system
- Workshop participants practice project elevator pitches
- Dart Lindsley explains Business Architecture
Design Thinking
Had my design consciousness raised at Overlap ’09 in Monterey. The press thought our meeting nefarious.
Business Week tells you “what went on at the clandestine affair.”
This year’s motley bunch included an assorted portfolio of designers; businesspeople, investors and MBA graduates; a tech systems architect who was also a former Navy Seal; and a tai chi master. The mean age was in the high 30s, with several people over 60 and a few in their mid-20s. “Despite coming from different backgrounds, we’re all risk takers We don’t fit in normal places so we make positions for ourselves,” says Dila, 45, who also has a PhD in philosophy.
Jane Hart, Jon Husband, Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn, and I formed the Internet Time Alliance to help organizations innovate in learning. We are outspoken advocates of curriculum-free, interactive, self-service learning. Organizations call on us to grow ecologies where work and learning are one and the same, where people help one another build competency and master new crafts, and where all strive to be all they can be. Open, participative, bottom-up, networked, flexible, responsive: that’s learning with business impact.
Last month we selected Charles Jennings to be our CEO; I will serve as Chair. I am really looking forward to working with my esteemed colleagues, who are also great friends.
Chair and CEO of Internet Time Alliance
Provided marketing and distribution advice to half a dozen web 2.0 companies, all of whom wish to remain anonymous.
Learning is Not Enough
Began to embrace idea that Learning is not enough. “Learning is a necessary but insufficient condition for working smarter. Dictionaries define learning as acquiring knowledge and skills. But we all know skilled, knowledgeable people who don’t get things done, don’t we? Learning that doesn’t lead to doing is no better than not learning at all.”
Articles
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.
Productivity in a Networked Era: 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.
My last column 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.
Whose Learning Are You Responsible For?
Last month I conducted several workshops to inject informal and social learning practices into hidebound organizations that were anxious to ramp up to the future. I encouraged them to address the needs of people who had traditionally been left out of the corporate training agenda.
Organizations have woken up to the power of people working together. Collaboration gets things done and is the most powerful learning tool in the CLO’s playbook.
Workshops
I conducted several onsite workshops to inject informal/social learning practices into hidebound organizations that are anxious to ramp up to the future. My intent is to challenge a couple of dozen managers to each come up with a major change project and shape up a pitch to sell the idea to their organization. I intend to coax them to plant dozens of seeds. If one or two take root, it may ignite the process of organizational transformation. This has me thinking about where companies should be placing their bets.
By the way, I can do this with your organization for a nominal fee. Virtual or face-to-face.
Clark Quinn and I gave a one-day workshop on implementing networked learning architecture the day before DevLearn. Here’s a podcast prequel.
After a decade of conversing online, Maish Nichani and I met face to face.
Lenora Routon Cross 1920-2009
Mom, my brother, and me (in plaid) in the early fifties.
Largest magnolia tree in the South, on our family’s homestead in Washington, Arkansas
Sitting in Bill’s cabinet room chair at the Clinton Library in Little Rock
Endless rows of FEMA trailers parked in Hope forevermore
Clark Quinn and I presented our somewhat disturbing research findings at the CLO Symposium.
George Siemens, Tony Karrer, and I co-hosted the third annual LearnTrends conference.
LearnTrends faculty
Un-books
Released several editions of Work Smarter at $19.95. Changed tag line to better reflect the content: Informal Learning in the Cloud.
North to Alaska
Until you’ve been to Alaska, it’s tough to imagine how large it is. In July, Uta and I joined our son Austin for vacation in Denali and Wrangell National Parks.
Gave a talk on Meta-Learning: Process of Learning in the Network Era and the VI International Seminar on Open Social Learning in Barcelona.
Barcelona
Stephen and George in Barcelona
Amazing meal at Tossa del Mar on the Costa Brava
DevLearn marked a significant shift in the field of corporate learning. Content and planning have become secondary to getting the job done. In today’s world, that means trusting workers to learn for themselves. The natives are taking control. Learning is mobile. Curriculum is toast.
In league with Charles Jennings and other members of Internet Time Alliance, put together a corporate learning track and hosted numerous sessions at Online Educa Berlin. Invited to join Educa’s planning committee.
Charles Jennings, introducing Internet Time Alliance.
Heike Philp, putting Online Educa online with simulcasting
Chaired a well-attended session at Educa on neuroscience and learning. I feel we’ve left some of the obvious findings of brain science out of our designs for learning environments. The scientists at the session warned us not to draw too many conclusions from the wiggles on fMRI charts.
Speaking
Here’s my shot at Pecha Kucha at Educa:
I was determined to improve my ability to excite an audience this year. A few months earlier I’d performed an Ignite session on the stage of Gnomedex. I’m practicing now and plan to have people on the edge of their seats a few months hence.
See also the Pecha Kuchas of Daniel Stern, Robin Good, and Heike. More to come.
The inaugural issue of Impact, the Journal of Applied Research in Workplace E-learning just appeared on the web. You can read this first issue on the web for free. I am on Impact’s Editorial Board. I have also been chosen to be a member of Chief Learning Officer’s 2010 Business Intelligence Board.
I’m attending Robin Good’s Professional Online Publishing course. (Online, of course.) Great stuff. Quite provocative.
Talent Management overtook Learning & Development in corporations this year. I led sessions on the future circa 2015 at the Future of Talent Institute Retreat. (I’m on the faculty; hard to believe this was my fifth retreat.) It was my second time at Asilomar in six weeks.
