Learning and Performance in Balance

If you scratch the surface of training and development in any organisation you realize that management doesn’t really care about learning; they want measurable performance. This is understandable and paying lip service to the learning organisation, et al, is a waste of time. At the organisational level, performance should be the only measure. However, there [...]

Seen in passing

I haven’t been posting much this Summer but I’ve taken some time to catch up on my reading and my social bookmarks are growing. Here are some items that have caught my interest: Ma.gnolia, a social bookmark service, goes open source Three ingredients to building your global microbrand Whatever happened to performance support? The Lifecycle [...]

The new nature of the firm

Read/Write Web has taken up the call of Enterprise 2.0 with a new channel on the subject and starts by examining the nature of the firm, how large corporations have amassed huge wealth and control over the past 50 years and the factors contributing to a potential change in this situation: Demographics: Retiring baby boomers [...]

LearnNB President calls for Humility

I’ve been involved in some way with LearnNB since its inception in 2003. For the most part, it’s been very much a maintenance of the status quo kind of professional/industrial association. There have been some interesting conferences but the association has produced few tangible results. I worked as a paid contractor for LearnNB this Spring, [...]

Student resources

For some, public school is already back in session, while others have a couple of weeks left. Both of our boys go back to high school after the labour day weekend. We’ve already purchased our school supplies, which were  fewer than required in previous years. Over the years I’ve picked up online resources that I [...]

Classtell

Via StartUpNorth is news of a bootstrapped website creation/hosting service for teachers. Classtell reminds me of edublogs but it has some differences. Firstly, it’s Canadian and secondly it is not free. The cost is only $20 per year and that should ensure some cashflow so that the system doesn’t collapse as it grows. It also [...]

The peerless cloud

The Accidental Tourist voices his concerns with cloud computing, the web mot du jour (thanks Karyn): … there is a Gartner report endorsing cloud computing. Then the very next paragraph states that the same organisation published a report warning of the dangers of cloud computing. The stability of cloud computing was examined by Read/Write Web [...]

Unmeeting

I attended a learning conversation on Unmeetings with Jay Cross and several other very interesting people today.  This will be the first of a series of dialogs on Learnscape Architecture. Jay said initially that, “The conversation will go where it wants to, but we’ll begin by considering how unmeetings can facilitate learning.” My reflections and [...]

You do not own me

Last year I went through a very long process applying for a job that had the potential to be interesting and challenging. It entailed no move on my part, mostly work from home, some international travel and the opening of new lines of business, both geographically and in terms of industry sectors. The salary was [...]

Representing social media

Ross Dawson shows four representations of the social media tool landscape, with the most recent and colourful Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas: Two of these visualizations have Conversation at the centre and this one includes, “The art of listening, learning and sharing”. Ross Dawson’s own example from last year puts social media [...]