MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

MindLeaders joins Twitter with learning tips and ideas

While many of us within MindLeaders are on Twitter (check out our Twitter addresses), I hadn't built a MindLeaders-specific Twitter account. The big question was: what would a MindLeaders Twitter account talk about?

Our personal Twitter accounts, I think, give a great view into the cool people at MindLeaders and the e-learning and training issues and ideas that we're batting around. We had a lot of hallway conversations about what we would want a MindLeaders Twitter account to "say."

Today, we're announcing that Twitter account. Our idea is that the MindLeaders Twitter stream will share all the good training, e-learning, and learning tips and thoughts that we share with each other and our clients. A few of these might be MindLeaders-content-specific, but mostly will focus on ideas that can be helpful to any trainer or HR leader.

Please check us out on Twitter, say hello, and share the word with any other friends in the training industry. If you have any ideas or suggestions about what you'd like to see from us there, please let me know here or in the tweeting world!

Does learning all boil down to searching?

We have a lot of words for new directions that learning is taking:

• Learning 2.0
• Informal learning
• Personal Learning Environments

I see a lot of common themes in these trends, like the use of technology, the decentralization of learning, and user control over their own learning.

Does it all boil down to searching?

The information we need is out there and accessible to us. We just have to be able to retrieve it when we need it, preferably with as little disruption as possible to what we're working on.

This is the keystone to the rise of Google: there's a ridiculous amount of information on the web, but it's useless to us unless we can search for it. The fact that Google does that for us in a pretty quick and seamless way has made it a ubiquitous part of our lives.

In organizational learning, we're trying to apply training and information more strategically, but it's the same concept. Knowledge Management, Content Management, and process and document tools are being used more and more because they're trying to provide this.

MindLeaders has been kicking this idea around for a while: we've been expanding our search capabilities and chunking information into smaller pieces that can be pulled to answer questions for people when the need arises for them.

So here's my oversimplification of the week: is corporate or organizational learning all about searching? To go back to a graph I mentioned a couple of months ago, 75% of learning is informal as we adopt and adapt to our work.

 

Is making the data that people informally talk about and use as accessible as possible 75% of our task? What do you think?

How to figure out Web 2.0 and Learning 2.0: Participate.

Everybody's talking about Web 2.0 technologies, in the learning field and just about everywhere else. People are even starting to talk about Web 3.0 - new buzzwords and wunderkind websites are coming! For folks who are still getting a grasp on what "2.0" is all about, I'd like to offer a big suggestion: Participate.

The Web (1.0) was a revolution. It let anyone and everyone publish. We all could tell the world our stories. When we consumed that information, though, we still had to go to each source we liked and try to gather new updates that were of interest to us.

Web 2.0 boils down to one thing: switching the control of the information. Now the power is in the hands of the consumers: we choose how, when, and in what format we get our information, and we interact with it. We share with our friends what information is good, post reviews and rankings of things we try, and with the help of our friends and our past viewing habits, much new information comes to us. It's all about interacting.

Because of that, there's only one way to really start using and "getting" Web 2.0 technologies: dive in. Start trying things out. Listen. Speak up. Start sharing your thoughts, your opinions, your expertise. Start a blog about your favorite topic. Open up a wiki for your next class. Subscribe to some podcasts.

Getting involved reaps benefits beyond just learning about those new Internet tools out there. You learn much more about any topic when you start communicating with other people about it. And you'll gain a wealth of ideas about what kind of interactivity other people are expecting when they arrive in your training programs, and new tools that you can use to meet them.

You don't have to participate in e-learning topics, but if that's one of your favorite things to be involved in (I hope it is!), here are some ideas for places to go check things out and mingle:

Blogs: There's this one, of course. Some of my other favorite e-learning blogs include:

• Big Dog, Little Dog: Great listings of interesting news tidbits and learning-related research.
• eLearning Technology: Tony Karrer's thoughts on all things "e" in the e-learning.
• The Rapid eLearning Blog: If you're building any of your own e-learning, this is the best blog out there that I've found for tips and ideas.

Social networks: Social networking isn't just for teenagers on MySpace. There's also:

• Learning Town, Elliott Masie's learning professionals network
• LearnTrends, a social network sponsored by George Siemens, Jay Cross, and Tony Karrer
• Don't forget LinkedIn and Facebook to connect with other learning professionals that you know or want to know, and to join the discussions going on in there.

Twitter: I posted recently about some great learning people to follow on Twitter.

This only scratches the surface, but I don't want to bury you in a list that's so daunting that you never try it. Please look at this list as ideas for starting points; the whole idea is to explore and branch out to find the connections and communities that best match your interests and styles. If you have your own personal favorites, please feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.

Happy participating!

2008 results for ThirdForce and MindLeaders

ThirdForce PLC (our parent company that owns MindLeaders and ThirdForce) has announced their 2008 results. It's good news of strong profits, hard to find these days, in MindLeaders' first full year as part of the company. For those of you who dig a financial read, ThirdForce's blog has posted a summary, and there's a good bit of coverage of ThirdForce's progress in the news.

For some less financially-bent news, MindLeaders launched nearly 3 million courses in 2008. Our five most popular courses of the year were in (drum roll, please):

1. Excel 2003 (twice!)
2. Customer Service (also twice!)
3. Time Management Fundamentals
4. Basics of Business Math
5. Computer Basics

To me, this list is a stark example of how much e-learning has changed, from a purely technical training medium to one that is being used by everyone, not just the techies, to learn software and business skills. E-learning has gone from being an end in itself ("Have to learn a computer topic? Use a computer to do it!") to a means, a tool that can be used towards almost any learning need.

Know of an interesting way that e-learning is being used? Please let us know in the comments!

New study on learning budgets and technologies

The MASIE Center has released a "Learning Resources Barometer," a survey of learning professionals about their budgets and how they're using them that will be updated periodically.

The results are scary and interesting. Scary part first: 62% of training budgets are being cut back. 36% of learning departments have been trimmed. The economic crunch is crunching us just like everybody else.

The most interesting part are the questions about how the training resources are being used. The biggest jumps (51% for both) are in e-learning (personal huzzah) and virtual/webinar training. The two next biggest winners in this economy are social learning (30% of organizations increasing) and the related user-generated content (29% increasing).

Knowing MASIE Center events, I'm guessing that these results are from the instant-polls at a recent learning conference. This is an excellent application of those in-event polling programs, but I'm wondering whether the results are affected by the self-selecting nature of the audience.

The immediate effect I can think of is that if (I don't know the actual poll source) this is from a learning conference, these participants would be from companies that may be spending a little more on training than the norm, if the companies are footing the bills to send these attendees.

Which is a depressing thought given the results about how many budgets are being cut, and could skew the 2.0/online/social learning results higher than the training world as a whole.

What's your feeling - do these results reflect what you're seeing on the streets?