Mayra Aixa Avilar (who I hope to meet someday, maybe at mLearnCon?) pointed to this post saying “mLearning is starting to diverge from eLearning not only in specific meaning, but in approach and design as well”, and I want to politely disagree.   Depends, of course, on what you mean by elearning, to start with.

The clear implication is that elearning is about courses on the desktop.  As I’ve discussed before, when I’m talking about ‘big L‘ learning, I’m covering research, performance, innovation, creativity as well as more typical execution. As a consequence, I’m talking performance support, social networks, portals, and more, as well as ...  Read the article

Businesses talk about speed, but they don’t take advantage of it

Organizations that don’t embrace new ways of operating and radically different approaches to corporate learning will not survive for three reasons:

1. We’re witnessing a dizzying rate of change. Business people are being overwhelmed by the pace of progress and the explosion of knowledge.
2. There are denser and denser interconnections afoot. Everything is getting hooked up to everything else. This increases complexity and...

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Following my recent post on the case for a non-training approach (NTA) to workplace learning and the launch of my NTA website, I’ve received quite a bit feedback and read a number of blog posts and comments about it. So I thought I would plot all these reactions on the learning technology adoption curve that my Internet Time Alliance (ITA) colleague, Harold Jarche and I produced last year (which is an adaptation of the one originally produced by Geoffrey Moore).

Firstly, just in case it is not clear, this chart plots organizations along the curve in terms of their use of learning technologies but ...

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We are hearing a lot about new social learning tools and platforms that are becoming available – but do you really need them in the workplace?

As business is becoming more social and we are using new social tools to work collaboratively with one another as we work, do we really need another set of social tools specifically for learning?

First of all I think I need to be very clear what I mean by “learning”. I don’t just mean studying a topic formally on a course but also about acquiring skills and knowledge in other (less formal) ways. The terms...

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1. Social learning has become the latest trending concept in the learning world. Although there have been, and there will be, many articles providing a definition of what social learning is all about, I think this article by Dennis Callahan sums it up, and makes it quite clear – social learning is like gravity – it’s just there all the time.

“Throw a ball in the air and it comes back or jump off a step and you come back, there’s gravity.  Watch two people talking over coffee or several people working on a problem together, there’s social learning.”

• http://learnstreaming.com/how-social-learning-is-like-gravity/

2. But now with the emergence of social media, the term “social leaning” is also being used to describe the use of social media in learning. However, it is much more than just...

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In my first posting on this topic, I showed how “social learning” is not just about a new training trend or about adding social media into the “blend” or acquiring the latest Social Learning Management System, but a fundamental change in how we need to view workplace learning.  And that in order stay in tune with new ways of working and learning, the L&D function needs to move from a “Command and Control” approach to one that I called “Encourage and Engage”.  To highlight the differences between these two approaches I then compared the “Command and Control” response with the new ”Encourage & Engage” response for each of the 8 features of how Smart Workers are working and learning today. But  I closed by saying that one  of the important questions that people  have about this new approach to Workplace Learning, is how they measure employee “learning” as well as L&D’s involvement.  So that is the topic of today’s post.

Let’s first take a look at managing and measuring employee “learning”.

The traditional approach to measuring learning in the workplace, has been to... Read the article

A few months ago I ran a webinar under this title for Citrix.

At the start I posed the question “when you think about one great learning experience you’ve had, can you remember where it occurred? Was it in a classroom or workshop, or did it occur while you were completing the task?”

I’ve asked this question, or variations of it, many times over the past few years. The response from this group was quite similar to earlier ones except it was neater – the split was exactly 80:20 – 80% said that the learning experience had been while they were completing the task and 20% said it was in a classroom or workshop.

Sometimes the response to this question has been more skewed towards the workplace (or in daily life – I ask people to include learning experiences that have occurred during childhood in their thinking). Rarely do more than 20% say their ...

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“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:

Grading, in a curious way, exemplifies our deepest convictions about excellence and authority, and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes excellence. If we crowdsource grading, we are suggesting that young people without credentials are fit to judge quality and value. Welcome to the Internet, where everyone’s a critic and anyone can express a view about the new iPhone, restaurant, or quarterback. That democratizing of who can pass judgment is digital thinking. As I found out, it is quite unsettling to people stuck in top-down models of formal education and authority.

Thanks to Johnnie Moore for pointing out this article, but then... Read the article