Eric Sauvé, of Tomoye, presented on informal learning in the enterprise. Tomoye’s clients include the US Army. Initial questions from the audience were:
- How do you prove that informal learning has value?
- How do get management’s buy-in?
- How do you ensure accuracy of content?
- How do you track legal issues & HR units/credits?
Eric views informal learning as something that adds value or augments formal learning in an organisation (I would say the opposite, but I’m just a learning radical). He also discussed the notion of employing workers/learners as a primary source of learning content; or the “YouTube-ification” of content. Other advice for implementation of Tomoye’s system, which looks like a blog/discussion forum mix for your Intranet, is to keep you tools simple . This follows the Web’s small pieces loosely joined design philosophy. Other points were to add a mechanism for positive reinforcement of good content and to use informal environments to validate the formal training that has been conducted.
Eric closed with a short discussion on collective intelligence or the wisdom of crowds. Overall this session was quite practical advice with some examples of one way to facilitate some aspects of informal learning.
