In response to yesterday's post on supporting learning to performance, Dave Ferguson left me an interesting comment: I think you have a good suggestion in terms of applying social media, though I'm not convinced it's always and everywhere necessary. You say, for example, "when workers are sharing and discussing via 'closed' systems such as email and face-to-face conversations," information about thinks like lack of understanding or need for new skills "is less accessble." That's true ...

The Masie Center has just published the results of their most recent survey on how employees learn in 2008 and it's an interesting read. More people are learning independently in ad hoc, asynchronous fashion. "In a six-month period of time, 70% turned to reading, 58% searched the web and 58% participated in on-line e-Learning to gain new skills or information for their jobs." I'm not sure if this a good or a bad sign. Are ...

Chris Brogan has given me permission to choose the social media tools that work for ME and I have to say it's a relief. I've been feeling guilty about not being able to get into these: Twitter--sorry Britt, Bud and Jeff, you had me convinced to give Twitter a shot, but it never quite did it for me. For one thing, I have online ADD and to get anything from Twitter it seems like I ...

Seth Godin says this about inbox culture:Years ago, I got my mail (the old fashioned kind) once a day. It took twenty minutes to process and I was forced to spend the rest of the day initiating, reaching out, inventing and designing. Today, it's easy to spend the whole day hitting 'reply'. Carving out time to initiate is more important than ever. These are some ways I tend to be reactive: Letting my learning and ...

For the past few days I've been working with a group of grant-funded projects from across Pennsylvania who are evaluating whether or not to form a state-wide network and thinking through what such a network could do. One of the issues that came up (as it inevitably does) was how to share information, which naturally led to a discussion of social media and networks. Last year I'd set up a Ning network for this group ...

These are some notes I found in in one of the artist sketch pads I use to capture my off-line ideas (yes, I do work offline). They seem particularly appropriate to share in light of yesterday's post on being a "career untouchable." Tips for Creating a Personal Learning Plan 1. Reflect on successes, challenges, etc., from the previous year. Also reflect on trends in your industry and/or occupation. What strengths do you want to further ...

I've always said there's no such thing as job security. Whether we realize it or not, most of us are essentially independent contractors, working at the whim of our customers, assured of employment only as long as we are able to add value in some way. This weekend I started thinking about ways to become a "career untouchable." That is, how do we position ourselves so that we are always providing value to our customers, ...

A.J. Jacobs, Esquire writer and author of two hilarious books is a man after my own heart. As he explains in this TED Talk, he spends much of his time immersing himself in learning experiments, such as what it's like to outsource your life (the best month of his life) or to be "radically honest" (the worst month of his life). Not only do these become fodder for his writing, they also teach him some ...

So much of the stupid stuff we do at work is because we don't really trust the people around us. We don't trust them to do the right thing. We don't trust that they are essentially good and competent or that they want to do good work for our organization. We especially don't trust that they will do the work. That's why we have dumb systems of control in place, like measuring people's "work ethic" ...

| View | Upload your own In a world that's rapidly evolving and changing, I think there's a tendency to want to make our learning match the pace of change. There's a focus on activity and rapid development that intuitively seems to make sense, but that in the end may not actually prepare us well for this new place. Nancy White has a great slideshow, Thinking About Slow Community (via Beth Kanter), that she blogs ...

According to Business Week and a study conducted by Rapleaf, the growth of social media (most notably social networks like Facebook) is being driven by women. Some key quotes:Among twentysomethings, women and men are just as likely to be members of social networks. Facebook, MySpace, and Flixster are extraordinarily popular. But we found that young women are much more active on these sites than young men. And men above 30???especially married men???aren't even joining social ...

From the slideshow by Neil Perkins, What's Next in Media, via Beth Kanter. Replace Neil's title with this-Learning 2.0: Workplace Learning Professionals Take on a Broader Role and the word "audience" with "learners" and I think this slide sums up a lot of how social media changes what we do. This is a sort of elaboration on my earlier thoughts about instructional designers and trainers as digital curators that breaks it down into some more ...

One of my favorite Steve Jobs stories is the one he told during this Stanford Commencement address a few years ago:Seventeen years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with ...

From the NYT: WHY do some people reach their creative potential in business while other equally talented peers don???t? After three decades of painstaking research, the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck believes that the answer to the puzzle lies in how people think about intelligence and talent. Those who believe they were born with all the smarts and gifts they???re ever going to have approach life with what she calls a ???fixed mind-set.??? Those who believe ...

The other day I mentioned Alfie Kohn, best known for his book, Punished by Rewards, which I devoured when it first came out and still return to from time-to-time. In one of those serendipitous moments that occurs so often in the blogosphere, a few days later I saw that Christy Tucker bookmarked one of Kohn's articles, so I clicked through to check it out. Although 9 years old, From Degrading to De-Grading, is an interesting ...

In yesterday's post, I gave some examples of various metaphorical structures for thinking about learning. At the end, I asked if other people found metaphors useful for thinking through concepts. In comments on that post, Kate Foy mentioned that she frequently uses metaphors and analogies to teach, while Ken Allen warned against getting too carried away with using metaphors as they can obscure, rather than enhance learning. In a wonderful post responding to mine, Britt ...