Learning strategy

  • The significance of digital platforms to the business

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    Business gets done by groups in workshops and meetings and by individuals in private conversation. There is an undeniable cultural advantage for diplomacy that comes from looking your interlocutor in the eye. Emerging digital platforms are in the margins of this business. The pioneers are creaky in their infrastructure and, ironically, playing catch-up. They have…

    Diving platform on Graveyard Hill in Kabul from TV-Hill, Afghanistan. Sven Dirks, Wien
  • How do we measure the impact of informal and incidental learning on organizational performance?

    Evidence from learning science clearly identifies how to strengthen learning culture in ways that will drive performance. However, in a recent study conducted by Learning Strategies International (LSi), we quickly found limitations and gaps in the data available from the organization examined, despite the best effort by the organization’s staff to answer our questions and requests.…

    Submarine control panel. Bowfin Submarine Museum, Pearl Harbor. Personal collection.
  • The future of learning that could have been

    In June 2017, the Institute’s president, together with its Chief Learning Officer (CLO), convened an all-hands-on-deck meeting to announce the Institute’s commitment to strengthening its learning culture of innovation and change through an innovative, evidence-based internal learning strategy. Staff were invited to nominate and then elect representatives to the Learning & Development Committee (LDC), mandated…

    Painting at Trigonos (25 January 2017). Personal collection.
  • 4 rules for the digital transformation of partnerships

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    This is a recorded version of my presentation, followed by Catherine Russ‘s report on a session that I presented and facilitated at the Remote partnering workshop held on 23-26 January 2017 in Caernarfon, Wales. Here is what Catherine Russ wrote in the workshop’s Report on Technology and Learning. In this session we delved into the reality that…

    Dawn in Trigonos, Snowdonia National Park, Caernarfon, Wales
  • Towers of technology

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    This came up in one of the Live Learning Moments in the first week of the Geneva Learning Foundation’s #DigitalScholar course: This is for Reda: I’m very used to the Coursera/EdX kind of LMS and I’m finding it difficult to follow the course related postings and schedules on the digital learning community currently. I just…

    skyscraperpage.com
  • Choose your own adventure

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    This is my presentation at the Online Learning Summit in London on 16 June 2015. I asked participants to choose between a set of four questions: Question #1: Why are learning, education and training so impervious to change? Number two is the Extinction Event question: It’s 2025. Your organization ceased to exist in 2020.  What happened? What…

    Wet Times Square (Kenny Louie/flickr.com)
  • Experience and blended learning: two heads of the humanitarian training chimera

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    Experience is the best teacher, we say. This is a testament to our lack of applicable quality standards for training and its professionalization, our inability to act on what has consequently become the fairly empty mantra of 70-20-10, and the blinders that keep the economics (low-volume, high-cost face-to-face training with no measurable outcomes pays the…

    Peter Paul Rubens. From 1577 to 1640. Antwerp. Medusa's head. KHM Vienna.
  • Publishing as learning

    We are both consumers and producers of publications, whether in print or online. Publications are static containers for knowledge from the pre-Internet era. Even if they are now mostly digital, the ways in which we think about them remains tied to the past. Nevertheless, at their best, they provide a useful reference point, baseline, or benchmark…

    Read the news (Georgie Pauwels/flickr.com)
  • Why we secretly hate webinars

    Webinars reproduce the structure and format of the formal training workshop in an online space. The sole positive distinction for participants is that they may now participate from anywhere. However, to ask questions or otherwise contribute requires one to be present at a specific time (synchronously). Recordings of webinars are usually made available, so in…

    Empty (schnaars/flickr.com)
  • Why supposedly boring conference calls are actually amazing

    Where phone and Skype remain the gold standard for one-to-one communication (and learning), many of us find value in conference calls, irrespective of the technology (phone, Skype, Webex, Hangouts…) used. Conference calls may seem as unimpressive or mundane as that other piece of paradigm-changing learning technology, the whiteboard – but that’s the point. They are learning technology that…

    Doc Porter Museum of Telephone History, Houston Texas, USA (Texas.713/flickr.com)