Learning

Learning

adapting to perpetual beta

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  • There is no such thing as a social business strategy.
  • There are only business strategies that understand networks.
  • Cooperative and distributed work is becoming the norm in the network era.
  • Social learning is how work gets done in networks.
  • Sharing power, enabling conversations, and ensuring transparency are some of the values of networked business.
  • Trust emerges when these principles are put in practice.
  • Learning is part of work, not separate from it.

What follows is a summary of what I believe are some of the most important issues facing organizational design today.

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licensed to connect

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In the last half of the 20th century in Canada it was mostly assumed that as an adult you had a driver’s license and that you most likely owned or had access to a car. I know, I didn’t get my license until I was 26 and that made me a very rare specimen indeed. Our cities, and especially our rural areas, are still primarily designed for motor vehicles. Malls continue to be built without designated pedestrian paths or bicycle lanes. Meanwhile, many older malls are abandoned and crumbling. Around here, it’s still assumed that everyone moves around by automobile.

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L&D outside the box

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ILTS0115This article appeared in Inside Learning Technologies & Skills Magazine, January 2015

Harold Jarche issues a challenge to L&D professionals in an environment where getting the work done is more important than learning anything new.

In the mid 1990s I became involved with my most expensive learning project. I was then serving as a Training Development Officer with the Canadian Armed Forces, working in tactical aviation (helicopters that support the Army). We had just purchased 100 helicopters. A $25M full-motion combat simulator had been thrown in with the $1B budget.

I was able to watch as the new simulator was installed at our training unit, as my office was next to it. As it was tested, discussions began on how best it could be used. As the ‘training guy’ I started researching best practices in flight simulation, and was able to see what our NATO allies were doing.

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9 ways to improve workplace learning

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Training, and education, are often solutions looking for a problem. But good training and education can have a huge impact on behaviour and performance. Remember that great teacher who inspired you? Did you ever have a coach who got you to a higher level of performance? But throwing content at someone and hoping for learning to happen is not a good strategy. This is how far too many courses are designed and delivered.

“As I’ve been working with the Foundation over the past 6 months I’ve had the occasion to review a wide variety of elearning, more specifically in the vocational and education space, but my experience mirrors that from the corporate space: most of it isn’t very good.  I realize that’s a harsh pronouncement, but I fear that it’s all too true; most of the elearning I see will have very little impact.” —Clark Quinn

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books in perpetual beta

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Finding Perpetual Beta is now in production. This new ebook is part of the continuing journey to understand how individuals and organizations can manage fundamental changes in networked society, business, and education. It is a series of reflections on the themes presented in Seeking Perpetual Beta, published in April 2014. It questions the status quo of how organizations are structured in order to get work done. In addition, there is an expanded Part 2 on personal knowledge mastery (PKM), a foundational discipline for working in the network era and a creative economy.

Here are some highlights, covering the main themes in Part 1: The Network Era.

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Workshop Bank

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If you conduct workshops, finding activities that relate to your themes can be a challenge. I have used one activity several times, first in Toronto in 2011. A while later, over a beer in Copenhagen, I met Nick Martin, who was beginning to develop a new website, WorkshopBank, to share ideas on ice-breakers and other workshop/training activities. He liked my use of the equilateral triangles collaboration exercise and it is now posted. In perusing Nick’s site, there are at least two new exercises I plan to try out.

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