Jane Hart just alerted me to this post on Blackboard Blog, 5 Myths About Informal Learning. My comment is awaiting moderation, so I’ll repost it here:

Right on. I’ve found that optimists view these five things as benefits where pessimists see only red flags. I’m in the optimist camp. Here’s my take:

“It’s too unstructured” = it’s open-ended, has room for growth, changes with the times, and let’s people be all they can be

“won’t retain” = people who learn at the point Continue reading →

Eavesdrop on a concentrated telephone interview avec moi on how to leverage the informal to improve business results. Thirteen minutes long, and you can bail after five.

Paris-based Marc Tirel interviewed me on Skype. He made this recording and shared it in a private session with management of a major bank in France.

Marc’s a pal. All we did was hit the recording button on Skype and have at it. As you can see, it’s conversational. The software costs nothing. I address a management meeting Continue reading →

In our session at the recent CLO Symposium, we asked the audience to tell us what they wanted us to talk about. The first response came from Dan Pontefract. Dan heads up learning and collaboration at Canadian communications giant Telus. He handed me a piece of paper on which he’d written “The Fallacy of Digital Natives.”

I said age discrimination is illegal in this country. My colleague Clark Quinn followed up with half a dozen reasons why dividing the world into digital natives and digital Continue reading →

There’s nothing new under the sun.

Knowing this doesn’t keep me from being humbled when I discover how many of my ideas I thought were original are things I took from others.

A few days ago a friend sent me a link to a 1999 presentation by John Seely Brown on Learning, Working, and Playing in a Digital Era.

A dozen years ago, JSB described explicit knowledge (know-what, resides in books) and tacit knowledge (know-how, lives in people and their practices). The explicit stuff is the tip Continue reading →

Palm Springs Air Museum. (Relive World War II).

Pigging out at Lulu.

I wouldn’t have said this five years ago, but America has become a better vacation deal than Europe. A dollar buys twice as much as a Norwegian Kroner — and you have a whole lot more to chose from.

Two weeks away from my day job.

Sometimes you need to back away from the day-to-day.

Reflection renews the spirit.

Great ideas appear when you remove your nose from the grindstone.

Life is good.

My friend Jerry Michalski has been linking his thoughts for a long, long time in the hypertext environment known as The Brain. Click a few links to explore his thinking.

All thinking is linking. Looking at another person’s links shows you their reality.

I preach the importance of transparency and narrating your work. It’s how you gain karma points in cyberspace. Imagine what a richer world this would be if we all shared our links and thinking as Jerry does here.

Along with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues Jane Hart & Clark Quinn and several hundred chief learning officers, I attended the Fall CLO Symposium this week. Our theme was “Game-Changing Learning: Development for the New Normal.” Sports metaphors filled the air.

The location was stunning: the Ritz-Carlton at Laguna Niguel. The hotel overlooks the magnificent beach at Dana Point. From the terrace, you could see a hundred surfers trying to catch the next wave way down below. This makes for Continue reading →

During our joint presentation at KM Brasil, my pal Luis Agarra simultaneously shot this video!

Jay Cross in KM Brasil from Luiz Algarra on Vimeo.

Luiz uses the same tiny Kodak videocam that I carry. It’s small enough that people don’t even realize you’re taking a video.

If you read Portuguese, you may enjoy these excerpts from the Working Smarter Fieldbook.

Last Tuesday I delivered a workshop in Sao Paulo on informal learning to clients of fast-moving Brasilian learning company Affero.

I’ll let the graphic recorders tell the story.