Continuous, Collaborative Learning? What's That? Free Webinar! June 6

What does continuous, collaborative learning mean and why does it matter?

Next week, I'll be leading a webinar where we can start a conversation and then continuously collaborate on this topic!

I'll be looking at what other smarty pants have to say on the subject, share some juicy tidbits and information, and take a look at what real organizations are doing.

Join me on 6/6 in this free webinar hosted by GoToTraining.

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Tips! Get your elearning tips!

I love tips. They're short, sharp and stuff you can use.

The eLearning Guild has just published a new ebook available to Guild Members:
68 Tips for eLearning Engagement and Interactivity. It's a compilation of practical ideas and tips from 11 individuals, myself included, who will be presenting in an eLearning Guild Online Forum this July.  

And if 68 tips isn't enough for you, be sure to check out the Kineo website for another 79+ elearning tips.

John Seeley Brown Keynote at #ASTD2013

These are my live blogged notes from the opening session at the ASTD International Conference and Expo (ICE) -- happening this week in Dallas, TX.  10,000 or so training and development people here to extend their practice. Forgive any typos or incoherence!

This morning's keynote with John Seely Brown: http://www.johnseelybrown.com

How to turn any situation into a learning moment? If you can do that, you’ll become an entrepreneurial learner.

We have been in a period of instability and it won’t be stable for a long, long time…

Corporations have yet to organize in high-end guilds like world of warcraft.

The half life of any skills is shrinking to less than five years.  We move from stocks to flows….

Stocks = assets that we packaged (the old order of corporate training)

Flow = the world no longer receives well structured assets. How do we participate in knowledge flows.  It’s about creating knowledge and participating in that creation.

When we create something, we have not had time to figure out the explicit component of that knowledge.  A lot of it is still tacit.  Tacit knowledge can’t be delivered by traditional training techniques.

How do we move from a world where our strategic leverage was scalable efficiency to one of scalable learning?

Participation & the embodied mind: the essence of tacit learning.

As kayaker becomes PART of the current – embedded in that current, and your mind is your arms and your head.  Hand and head learn together in this kind of embodied context.

Strategic leaders need to think about embodied participation.

We have moved from an era of equilibrium to a word of dis-equilibrium – disruption every year.

Our ways of working need to be reframed. It’s a new mindset that we need for this new world.

A paradigmatic example:

How do we leverage a worldwide ecosystem as our learning environment?

He shares the story of Dusty Payne and his cohort of friends from Maui who became world champion surfers.

As a group, Dusty and his friends studied frame by frame DVDs of other world champion surfers. Then they got entrepreneurial and pulled the best ideas from other “adjacencies” (windsurfing, skateboarding, mountain biking, motor cross…)

Looking around in an entrepreneurial way

Questing, Play, Probing boundaries to invent new things.

Dispositions can not be taught, they can only be cultivated. 

Reverse Mentorship: we have a lot to learn from the kids.

How can you make Mentorship and Reverse Mentorship work together? The kids learn from the elders, the elders learn from the kids.

Building a community of peer-mentors.

Creating and sharing knowledge through a virtuous circle.  Using simple social software to create a network of practice or a community of practice. In SAP, almost obsoleted the need for the corporate training.

Much of the real work and learning happens in the emergent – so how do we really support this?

The distributed water cooler is everywhere.

We’ve not been supporting the emergent and informal.

Basically, work IS social.

e.g. Google Hangouts lets you bring up to 10 people together to work on Google Docs – a feeling of intimate space. You also have the ability to have people link and lurk on the periphery. So 10 core people, but limitless people can observe what’s going on and can pass a question in. Brown calls this “legitimate peripheral participation.” So this can scale….

Brown lists amazing innovators: Jeff Bezos, the Google guys, etc. – they all went to Montessori school.  Entrepreneurial learners?

“In a world of constant change today’s creators must be willing to regrind their conceptual lenses.”

Let’s go back and think about PLAY.

How did we learn how to frame the world? Not in school. We PLAYED.

Book: Homo Ludens (a highly nuanced concept of play_ -- permission to fail and fail again, play of imagination (poetry), an epiphany – when something falls into place.

Not just creativity, but the play of imagination. Learning as riddles – learning to reframe the world every five years.

Extending blended epistemology:

Knowing, making, playing

Through play, we find new ways to make sense out of the world.

Consider Facebook.  Hackathons. Once a month everyone gets together to try things out and break it – a radically different attitude than most organizations. This has helped to create a deep learning community within Facebook.

Google has become famous for the 20% rule – to go on own and explore new rule in 20% of their time.

“Every time we have done something crazy, we have made progress.”

The old school mindset: “I am what I wear/own/control.”

Today’s mindset: “I am what I create, what I share, and what others build on.”

There is a fundamentally new kind of individual entering the job market:

• More interested in learning than salary
• Adaptable and mobile: east cost educated, west coast bound
• More interested in start ups
• Risk taker
• An entrepreneurial learner
• Technically sophisticated and social adept.
• She won’t want to work in the traditional workplace environment.

In the 20th century, we viewed institutions as things that shaped individuals- to create people who were comfortable to work in factories and standardized bureaucracies.

In the 21^st century, the individuals reshape the institutions. They come with agile minds.

For this to work:

We must thing about mentorship and reverse mentorship. How do these kids help shape the institutional architecture, and how do we help these kids see they don’t know everything yet. These need to co-mingle.

The CLO will need to become the Chief Organizational Architecture. To create a learningscape.

We need to be responsive to these types of changes.

If your culture doesn’t work that way, you need to change your culture. These are the types of things we need to take on. How do we become the architects of the institutions that we want these kids to be part of – to provide fluidity and scale (without inertia or mass).

Where imaginations play, learning happens. 

Imagination needs to reign supreme.

Sir Ken Robinson Opening Keynote #ASTD2013

@sirkenrobinson

These are my live blogged notes from the opening session at the ASTD International Conference & Expo (ICE) -- happening this week in Dallas, TX.  10,000 or so training and development people here to extend their practice.

We all have deep talents, but it’s often the case that we don’t discover them. Human talent are like the world’s natural resources – they are often buried beneath the surface. And if you don’t go looking for them you’ll never find them.

You need circumstances for talent to demonstrate themselves…

Whether you actually discover your talents is another matter.

Why don’t we discover what we’re good at? It’s because of our organizations and our education systems. 

What really makes you a success is PASSION. “If you love what you do, you’ll never work again.”

When it’s just a job, you’re disengaged.

People who love what they do…”this isn’t what I do, it’s who I am.”

Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative (Sir Ken book, published ten years ago.) Publisher wanted to do a 10^th anniversary issue – instead of updating it with spell check and a bottle of Jack D, Sir Ken read it and then rewrote it.

When a really original idea turns up, it excites everyone’s imagination. What we’re seeing now is a maelstrom of digital innovation (turning the iphone into a harmonica so you can play the Delta Blues during a meeting, because we know those meetings can be so sad).  10 years ago we didn’t have ipads.  10 years ago people didn’t Tweet.

 Regarding talking to people on planes – “I would rather regret the conversation we didn’t have…I’m OK with talking to people on the final taxi.”

The combination of passion AND aptitude is what it means to be in your element.

Some people do things because they’re good at it – but that’s not enough. Being good at something isn’t enough reason to spend your life doing it.

A strong passion will take you farther with moderate talent, than talent without passion.

Today we have a crisis in human resources.

Last year, sales of anti-psychotics/anti-depressants out sold anti-acid reflux in the US.

There’s a myth that happiness is directly geared to material wealth. We know the opposite is true and that there’s no correlation.

Depression is going up as material wealth increases around the globe.

But happiness is not a material state.

A crisis – so many people have not discovered a sense of purpose in their lives.

The Element: doing something that you’re good out and that you love to do.

Every single life is different. We are infinitely variable. And it really is a gift that you are here in this world.  It’s amazing how little people settle for.

Two key principles:

• Life is unique and inherently diverse. Nobody else will be you.
• You create your own life. You have made your life what it is. You earn your resume. What you do with your life is in your control. And you can recreate it.

Often, people’s lives have been shaped by an interest that no one else sees any value in. (He shares the story of Bart, who could walk on his hands and turned out to be the world’s most celebrated male gymnast…his mother brought him to the gym—she encouraged him).

Life is organic and a process of improvisation.

When ordinary people find their passion, extraordinary things happen. (We’re organic creatures; we’re inherently creative).

Sir Ken Robinson’s new book: Finding Your Element (out today!)

A quest - - where you set off hoping to find/discover something, but you’re not sure what…

Tony Bingham Opening Keynote #ASTD2013

These are my live blogged notes from the opening session at the ASTD International Conference & Expo (ICE) -- happening this week in Dallas, TX.  10,000 or so training and development people here to extend their practice.

Tony is the President and CEO of ASTD. He shared a lot of date and useful info on current trends with mobile.  I only captured some if, but hope someone else took better notes!

Only 30% of orgs have put mobile content out there.  In 2013!

Security concerns have been the biggest barriers – some content needs to be more protected than others.  OK to put sexual harassment training or management training out there and less secure.

Think Globally – in India more access to smartphones and using them differently whereas in the US we might have access to all sorts of devices.  Use the tools that are available to solve the problems that you’re org is faced with.

With mobile -- we've been talking about it for eight years or more, and now it's really starting to happen.  

5 Tips from ASTD on mobile:

1. Think mobile – always think how to use it to augment learning. (don’t just put a course out there – think performance support, product training…)
2. Start small – expect obstacles and be prepared for them.
3. Create content specific for mobile devices. It has to be simple enough but not too simple.
4. Partner with IT/Compliance/Regulatory – work to clear security barriers.
5. Identify impact and effectiveness – tie to business needs and goals.

Some suggested books on mobile:

Chad Udell, Learning Everywhere

Going Mobile from ASTD

Learning Theories

The amazing Jane Bozarth (@janebozarth) shared this today and it looks like a great resource if you're looking to learn more about learning theories.

With hyperlinks galore, you can drill down to learn about Vygotsky (and possibly even how to say it!), scaffolding, experiential learning and more.

What are the established learning theories?