I'm glad you use the word 'context'. A lot of the social learning patter these days seems to focus just around the cool tools we see all around us. While the tools are crucial to the success of social learning, it's important that we consider other factors too. OTOH when selecting a platform, we need take into account when the tools actually do matter. Speaking of tools - I recently wrote a blog post about 6 social learning platforms that you can enable on demand. The one thing I'll mention though - please don't fall into the trap of creating walled gardens. Consider the little things that make a huge difference; for example, metadata.
Given my background as a training consultant, I know for a fact that a vast majority of people think of a training magic wand that'll make their performance problems disappear. As consultants however we need to be pragmatic and determine if training really is a solution. Our current performance problems need us to think beyond trainer mindsets, and we need to avoid being one-trick-ponies.
There's a huge people angle to developing learning strategies. Firstly, all people are not the same - I like using the Dreyfus Model to plan how we can involve people at varying levels of expertise. You may also find my learning paths approach useful, so you can avoid the pain of big-upfront training. Most importantly, we need to devise our strategies to be pull-based, so we don't keep creating overloaded, one-size-fits-all-but-fits-none approaches to learning. I like approaches where we empower our learners and let them think for themselves like adults.
I'm hardly an industry commentator to answer this question - but let me take a shot. If there's one word I want to focus on, it's versatility. L&D people in today's age need to wear multiple hats. If there's another word I want to focus on, it's creativity. We're beyond the point where one specialist can solve business problems with a known solutions. We're getting to a point where business is so fast that we're encountering problems we've never seen before. So I can't say much about the 'state of the art' except that we need learning generalists who can approach problems creatively, by applying diverse perspectives and heuristics.
Those are quite a few things to comment on arent' they? I have a huge interest in how people work together. Working at ThoughtWorks has been a revelation for me. At ThoughtWorks, working with people like Patrick Kua has made me realise what an important place feedback has in helping people grow. A few months back I piggy-backed on some of Pat's posts and wrote a post of my own about about building a feedback culture. I completely understand that in the absence of the right culture it's tough to give and share feedback. To make it easy I recommend separating the 'what' and 'if' of feedback and treating all feedback you get as a gift. Yet again, if you're in a situation of conflict, you may want to try the technique of percepual positions to evaluate the situation from different perspectives.
I also have a strong interest in being a student of leadership practice and HR. You'll notice that from my unending rants on the history of heirarchy, on how I approach leadership, and how I believe organisations should run their career development and leadership development programs. I could keep going on, but I'll stop by directing you to all of the little other things I keep posting about.
Ha, ha! This is where I pop out an answer and people's estimation of my skills goes way down! Well, I use good old Powerpoint for most of my graphics. This however is the stuff I have least information about on my blog. You may find some tips in my blog posts about visual design, but I must confess you'll find far greater inspiration on Tom Kulhmann's posts on visual and graphic design.
Oh I have tons of inspiration to share with you. Let me first direct you the 6 talks you should absolutely watch if you're a presenter or a trainer. I'm going to add Ken Robinson's latest TED talk to that list. Speaking of TED, it's a great place to learn not just about the various interesting developments across the world, it's also a great place to get inspiration for your own presentation style. Even Bill Gates seems a transformed speaker on TED. But if you're looking for the mother of all inspiring talks, you've got to watch the last lecture by Randy Pausch - and here's my commentary on Dr. Pausch's talk.
In addition to this, there's all the inspiration I get from the web. Here are some news bundles I've created which you may find useful:
- Blogs from the Agile Community
- Blogs about Enterprise 2.0
- Blogs about Elearning and Learning Technology
 | The RSS feed for this blog |
 | My twitter handle - @sumeet_moghe |
Well that's the map for this blog which I wanted to share with you. I hope it gives you and easy way to contextualise useful information from this website.
So, how did you find the last two blogposts? I defnitely want to hear from you about this post, so please, please tweet this post if you can and also leave your comments here. Thanks!
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