Category Archives: Community

California State Railway Museum

trainYesterday afternoon I took the train from Berkeley to Sacramento. Wifi, plenty of room, no distractions: the train makes a good office. My destination was the California Railroad Museum.

Sacramento

The Railroad Museum is captivating for the same reason as the Monterey Bay Aquarium: it’s the real stuff and it comes from right here. Most of the fish, otters, and sea creatures in the Aquarium are native to Monterey Bay. Most of the trains in the Railroad Museum are tied to California history.

Sacramento Sacramento
This is the first locomotive in California, shipped in pieces around the tip of South America and named for railroad mogul and governor of California Leland Stanford. Here, it’s heading into a snow shed in the high Sierra.

Sacramento Sacramento
The Golden Spike that tied together the transcontinental railway was a big, big deal for California, providing an overland alternative to long-range shipping. Giant locomotives hauled goods through long tunnels in the Sierra. The cab is at the head of the train to keep engineers from suffocating. You’re allowed to tour the cab.

Sacramento
The wonderful mining locomotives of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad are on display.

Sacramento Sacramento

Sacramento Sacramento

You can wander through an RPO (railway post office), dining car (place settings from many rail lines), sleeping car (which jostles as if it were real), and kitchen (only to look; it’s too small to walk through). Hundreds of school children were having a ball on the cars.

Sacramento
The railroads lured millions of people to California. How else do you promote a railroad? Some of the come-ons are lovely.

Sacramento Sacramento
I’ve taken up model railroading again. The museum has acquired a great collection of “toy trains.”

Sacramento Sacramento

Sacramento
Mannequins and people dressed in conductor’s uniforms bring the scenes to life.

Sacramento
Visiting the Railroad Museum is a whole lot more fun than reading history books. I’m confident the lessons are more lasting.

I’ve proposed that every corporation needs a history museum even if it’s just a single room or online. Artifacts reinforce values. Tales of past mistakes remind us of what not to repeat. Success stories make us proud of accomplishments. Surely, our organizations have important things to show than bowling trophies and little lucite blocks from investment bankers.

danah boyd on teens and 21st century work

danah boyd opened ASTD TechKnowledge 2013 with a keynote on teenagers, networks, and work in the 21st century.

danah spells her name in lower case, but everything else about her is upper case: Master’s in Sociable Media with Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab, PhD at UC Berkeley School of Information advised by Peter Lyman and Mimi Ito, fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication, fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard, work at Yahoo, Intel, Google, and now Microsoft.

danah has been Continue reading

Reinventing management, the Stoos movement

Full house (10) for today’s Hangout on Air. I don’t know how many watched on YouTube.

We had a good discussion of the Stoos Movement and combining agile with management. Or replacing management with agile.

YouTube:

Slides from Hangout:

Transcript from Hangout:

You invited people into the hangout.

Peter Isackson

9:49 AM

Hi Jay

You invited people into the hangout.

Loretta Donovan

10:37 AM

Given Continue reading

Best books

The Google+ Learning in Organizations Community is up to 240 members. Join us.

Last month, I asked “What books would you recommend to someone who’s new to organizational learning and wants a feel for what’s going on?” Here are the answers so far.

learningThe Support Economy | Shoshana Zuboff

Larry Victor recommendation. Jay seconds..

Join our Learning Hangout Tuesday at 1:30 pm Pacific/4:30 Eastern/9:30 Greenwich

Join Google+. (If this is your first time, allow 15 minutes to get set up.)

Join our Learning Community.

At the appointed hour, I’ll open the Hangout.

A Hangout accommodates ten people in a video conference. First come, first served.

Have your video cam and audio ready to go.

Bring a question. This is an Un-Hangout.

 

 

 

How to Replace Top-Down Training with Collaborative Learning (4)

Fourth post in a series. In case you missed them, here are the first, second, and third posts.

Is your organization ready?

How ready are you to tackle Big L Learning? Where does your organization fit on the progression from Hierarchical Organization to Collaborative Organization?

You can take this survey online. We’ll report the aggregate results in a couple of weeks.

Our employees can access the entire Internet from their desktops. ☐ yes ☐ no

Our people are learning and Continue reading

How to Replace Top-Down Training with Collaborative Learning (3)

Third post in a series. In case you missed it, here are the first and second.

INFRASTRUCTURE
Technological infrastructure for social learning

Work and learning are converging, and as this change happens, the infrastructure of the old corporate learning must go – things like traditional one-size-fit-all in-person training seminars. In its place enters social and informal learning hubs like on-demand content, live online discussions, wikis and forums, and searchable content archives. The Continue reading