Regarding my post the other day on the Tyranny of Dead Ideas, commenter Kate Riel asked an interesting question: Just articulating a dead idea is a huge step for an individual or organization because it makes you question those notions that define self efficacy. So how does an organization nurture and support an environment with no 'sacred cows' where it is safe to express an existing pattern as potentially a... Read more →

I'm reading Matt Miller's The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity. Some may argue with both the ideas that Miller identifies, as well as their implications. However I think that few would challenge his premise that "in every era, people grow comfortable with settled ideas about the way the world works" and that it is this "intellectual intertia" that... Read more →

The Work Literacy online learning event is over and Harold Jarche has posted some of what he learned from our facilitation of the course. Time for me to share some of my thoughts. . Using Ning for the Course Our first big decision was what platform to use. We ended up going with Ning because it integrated several different tools (blogs, forums, video and photo-sharing, social networking profiles, groups) at... Read more →

I have consistently been impressed by the Obama campaign's use of social media, particularly in the past 12 months. His win last night suggests to me yet another reason that we must take the tools of social media seriously as having the power to utterly transform old paradigms for getting things done, as this morning's article in WIRED indicates: He's run a campaign where he's used very modern tools, spoke... Read more →

One of the big questions I'm frequently asked about using social media is whether or not the tools "work." Depending on the questioner, this can mean a variety of things, but underlying everything is one issue--will my department or organization improve if we use social media? Via Shel Holtz and Workplace Learning Today comes yet another "yes," to that question. Shel cites a brief published by the Aberdeen Group, titled... Read more →

Over at The eLearning Guild Research blog, Steve Wexler has been sharing some of the research we've been looking at to prepare the Guild's e-Learning 2.0 report, due out in late September. I've had a chance to see all of it because I'm co-authoring an essay that will be included in the report and there's some very interesting stuff there. These are some nuggets that Steve's shared so far that... Read more →

| View | Upload your own In a world that's rapidly evolving and changing, I think there's a tendency to want to make our learning match the pace of change. There's a focus on activity and rapid development that intuitively seems to make sense, but that in the end may not actually prepare us well for this new place. Nancy White has a great slideshow, Thinking About Slow Community (via... Read more →

Jen of @injenuity is feeling frustrated with Ning: It pains me to say this, but I am no longer a fan of Ning for community building. It has been a year since I created my first site, a network for moms that has grown to 200 plus members, but I have no time to maintain. The network I created for faculty at my campus plugs along, but isn’t functioning the... Read more →

Karyn Romeis is wondering how people got started with social media and what it's meant to their professional practice. This is part of her dissertation, which she is actually writing on a wiki--a strategy I think is pretty interesting. So here's my story. . . I've been online since 1995, participating initially in email listservs and forums. I also dabbled in teaching classes with what we, at the time, called... Read more →

A few weeks back, I was doing some thinking about 21st century workplace literacy and wondering why edubloggers and workplace learning bloggers weren't having more conversations about what constitutes "literacy" in a radically changed workplace. I would argue that by anyone's definition, digital literacy should be part of what we mean when we talk about the skills that all workers need to be successful. I'd go so far as to... Read more →