For the past few months, I've been doing a lot of thinking about and exploring of personal learning environments (PLEs). I've written about my own personal learning environment here and here and I've been bookmarking a ton of articles on the concept here. I'm interested in the notion of a personal learning environment because I think that the concept offers a lot of promise for personal and staff development. I... Read more →

Some more support for the Results Oriented Work Environment I've been spouting off about lately. . . Today's New York Times has an interesting article--Time Wasted? Perhaps It's Well Spent. It notes: American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, but describe 16 of those hours as “unproductive,” according to a study by Microsoft. America Online and Salary.com, in turn, determined that workers actually work a total... Read more →

My husband, like many Americans, is unhappy with his job. It is a job that combines impossibly high expectations with little personal control. There is a strong emphasis on "face-time" and productivity is measured by your slavish adherence to poorly thought-out metrics that emphasize process over outcomes. So it was interesting to find, as often happens to me when a problem is on my mind, this post from Ryan Healey... Read more →

It's interesting the difference a day makes. Yesterday I expressed my frustration over my inability to change people who are meant to be change agents. Writing it down got most of the negative energy I was feeling out of my system. It also left me some space to think a little more about the problem. And another reason to be grateful for blogging--writing about it brought me some good advice... Read more →

Via Neville Hobson, highlights from a new report from the Pew Charitable Trust, "A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users": 8% of Americans are deep users of the participatory Web and mobile applications Another 23% are heavy, pragmatic tech adopters – they use gadgets to keep up with social networks or be productive at work. 10% rely on mobile devices for voice, texting, or entertainment 10% use information gadgets,... Read more →

A couple of interesting studies re: email use and our responses to it, via Jeremy Dean of PsyBlog. The Impact of Capitalization and Emoticons on Perceptions of Email Apparently, depending on your personality type, proper use of capitalization and the use of the smiley emoticon can make you seem more likable. According to one study cited by Dean (Byron and Baldridge, 2007): They found that, sure enough, using correct capitalisation... Read more →

A few days ago, I posted about an article in Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge. It was on an interview with Harvard professor Amy Edmondson who has found that that learning makes people less productive at work, at least during the learning process. I suggested that organizations should accept that lack of productivity is part of learning and that it shouldn't keep them from encouraging and supporting learning with their... Read more →

Are teams that learn less productive than ones that don't? Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson says that in the short term, they probably are. In an interview in Working Knowledge from the Harvard Business School, Edmondson argues that there are built-in tensions between learning and performance that smart organizations must learn how to address. To learn means to become less productive, at least for a while, and she points to a... Read more →

Via Doing Well by Doing Good comes a great video in which Seventh Generation CEO Jeffrey Hollender asks a question that all nonprofits should be asking themselves: "How can we expect an organization to reach its full potential if we aren't ensuring that our staff are reaching their full potential?" That's a really profound question, I think, especially for organizations that are built upon the knowledge and skills of their... Read more →

A few days ago, I posted about my personal learning environment and how I'm using a variety of web-based tools to manage my own learning. Since then, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the whole concept of personal learning and how that relates to "staff training and development," what I consider to be more institutionally-driven training. In addition, thanks to a mention in Stephen Downe's excellent OLDaily, a... Read more →