Your company has a corporate social responsibility program, but is your learning organization part of the CSR strategy?  It should be, and here’s why: Read more »

How do we define social learning?

Is it a collaborative approach? Enhanced feature sets to engage learners? Strategy tied to learning initiatives from a business standpoint?

Or is it a way to ensure that our employees and our customers see the value of  learning and its benefits?

Benefits of Social Learning

• Gives power and provides engagement to your learners, they seek this out
• Eliminates passive training, now you can find out what your employees are thinking, responding and inquiring about
• Opens up an experience that can show the real impact of learning
• Does away with instructor led training that is often non-engaging, lacks interactivity and hopes that everyone asks questions and is involved (rarely the case)
• Enables people regardless of location, division, department to be part of something rather than nothing
• Offers opportunities to link to job roles, skills, leadership development using tools not available before

Two types of Social Learning & Benefits

Social Q/A

• End users ask questions, Subject matter experts respond, end users add comments
• Unique Value Proposition- establish mentoring program, one learner to one SME (via department, division, region, etc.)

Gain?

• Eliminates on the job training – which has been shown ineffective in the long term
• Identifies topics that could be used for future training

Scribd & Slideshare

• Employees or Trainers can upload presentations and share them with other learners
• Training department or employees can create, upload, read, print or share documents, audio/video files, presentations, spreadsheets, etc.

Unique Value Proposition

• Training Departments can provide quick reference materials, cards, video clips or presentations, audio, etc. to employees/customers and identify how many times they have been viewed, printed & shared – reduces cost to department for unnecessary future training or courses, reduces cost to department (eliminates printing/shipping), opens up global experience – which can be tied to native language (for example you have employees outside your home country)

Gain

• Localized learning
• Higher engagement
• Eliminates waste
• Identifies topics to train & topics to re-train (via blended learning or e-learning)

Bottom Line

Social Learning offers your learners, new opportunities, provides you as a training executive with future topics without the need of constant gap analysis, reduces costs in the short term and long term and identifies what your trainees need and want.

To gain a new perspective on social learning, please make sure to attend the exclusive event of the year, the Global Leadership Congress, May 9-11, 2011 in Philadelphia.  A roundtable on this topic and its strategy from a training and department angle will be presented. To learn more about the roundtable including the agenda, click Social Learning at GLC.

We teach our children through stories not because it is a simplistic or naïve methodology, but because narrative orders our experience.  The power of narrative lies in its capacity to reinforce memory; to engage the mind and emotions with an immediacy that intensifies the learning experience; and to create community. Read more »

In our Social Learning Executive Council, we’ve spent the past 18 months studying how organizations are applying social media technologies to improve learning.  From our observations, one thing is clear: online learning via talking books with interactive video and conferencing with peers, experts and authors is going to happen…and it’s going to happen on an iPad or one of the other 30+ tablets we are now tracking (see The Tablet Tidal Wave).

2011 CorpU Social Learning Executive Council

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I’ve been fielding a lot of questions lately, and one that has come up a few times recently as learning professionals plan out changes to their 2011 programs, approaches, systems, and staffing is this: my organization has green-lighted us to engage more in the social media space and I want to know whether there are any easy tools out there to help me pull in RSS feeds and content from the likes of twitter, yammer and other sites to our learning portal/gateway?

I like to start a conversation to determine how comfortable the person is with the topic — because short content from your colleagues on Yammer does not generally seem to fit what one would expect to see on a learning portal/gateway. If I get the chance, I try to ask some context-setting questions like:

1. Does your company have a social media policy?
2. Will the feed push content to a site behind the firewall?
3. Have you sufficiently separated the content so that your authorized content is visually distinct from the syndicated content?
4. Do you have some favorite sites that syndicate (i.e., make a real-simple syndication, or RSS, available)?
5. Are you allowed to use public services like
   • Yahoo Pipes
   • Google News Feeds
   • Twitter Paper
   • Google News Search?
6. How comfortable are you writing code? Do you have someone on the team with both the know-how and the time?
7. Are you looking to grab real-time content from social sites like Twitter, Yammer, YouTube, or Facebook?

In the last few months, the options for aggregating content from sources like Twitter, Yammer, Facebook, and others was limited to code you modified or installed from SourceForge. That’s changed recently, and there are a few interesting options to enable real-time data aggregation, which can be used to connect learning programs with news and info going on around the company. It also makes it easy to push out short learning materials to your colleagues, and bring the learning closer to the point of need (especially if you “market” your learning programs effectively).

One to consider is the free real-time data stream language from Kynetx called Kynetx Rule Language (KRL), which allows for a more sophisticated tracking of real-time information. According to the site, KRL allows a web programmer to write rules that respond when specific data is identified in a data feed. KRL simplifies the effort for a web developer to write interfaces and applications that make use of data from different Web services, storing that data in the cloud. KRL is free to use and test, but Kynetx charges for it if it’s incorporated into a commercial application.

There are others besides KRL. Gnip, based in Boulder, Colorado, connects to a variety of services, including Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Their interface makes it pretty easy to repackage data and functions from these online social media services, meaning that you could connect your learning portal, for instance, to your company’s youtube channel, to allow for real-time updating when new video is uploaded.

Besides these two, a few other APIs may be useful for use in a learning portal/gateway:

• Google’s Social Mention API
• RealityDigital
• Samepoint
• Perhaps use a lifestreaming source to point to a corporate online identities, something like Flavors.me

There’s plenty more to look at, but, to me, the most important question to answer is this one:
how will these real-time feeds augment my learning portal to make it more timely and relevant for my colleagues?

“Don’t let it come crashing down on you”

Defying all expectations, Apple’s iPad is selling over 1 million units monthly since inception.  The rise of eBooks is unstoppable.  Sure, you can be a naysayer; I was.  I like my print newspaper and my hardback books, thank you very much.

But it’s time to wake up to the fact that print book sales are declining:

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As part of my DevLearn|10 presentation in San Francisco, Nov 3, 2010, I’m including some supplementary material for the purpose of continuing the conversation.

Privacy Policies As They Relate to Online Learning

Presentation slides

For the better part of this year, I have served as the “CLO in Residence” for the Corporate University Xchange; now it is time for me to step aside and hand the baton to the next “CLO in Residence.”   While I am excited about the journey I will soon begin, this parting is bittersweet.

I was deeply touched to have been asked to be the first “CLO in Residence.”  The folks on the Corporate University Xchange team, led by Alan and Sue Todd, have been great friends and colleagues over the years.    I have been the beneficiary of their many kindnesses as well as their contribution to the profession through research, Global Leadership Congresses and benchmarking.   I’ve led teams that aspired to be recognized by CorpU and we’ve been honored on several occasions; those will always be among the professional high points of my life.   I have so enjoyed writing the blog on the CorpU platform; I’ve had free reign to opine at will about the various aspects of talent management and human capital; highlighting great research from thought leaders wherever I found them as well as the contributions of the legends of our profession.  Thanks to the many of you who responded to posts and continued the dialogue.   And I’ve enjoyed hosting webinars – great panelists and topics; I always learned a great deal.

I will always be deeply grateful for the opportunity to have served in this capacity and, for a time, to have been part of the CorpU family; it has been a professional honor and a personal privilege.

Rebecca

As promised, my second book report on a book by someone I admire a great deal in the Human Capital space: Peter Cappelli.  Earlier this week, I wrote of The India Way. Now let’s look at an earlier book, published in 2008 but still timely, Talent on Demand, which was also published by Harvard Business Press.  In this book, Peter makes a compelling case for looking at talent in new and different ways.  Here’s a snapshot of the key concepts and “take-aways” in the book:

• The old approach to succession planning is no longer viable or practical and even though more than half of all US and European companies don’t engage in succession or workforce planning, you should;
• Competition for talent will always be a constant and high rates of employee turnover and disengagement mean a review of all talent management efforts;
• Every talent decision you make should be viewed through the lens of the return that is expected for that decision;
• Managing people by adopting some “supply chain” management practices can help to reduce the inherent uncertainty of succession and talent development;
• Weigh carefully the “build vs. buy” options knowing the daunting statistics of external hire success rates; and
• Manage your internal processes carefully so that there is a balance between a “pool” of candidates and a “sea” of extra players that becomes unwieldy.

I can’t do justice to the book in a few lines but you gain valuable insights from reading the book.  It’s a great read…I recommend it highly.   To learn more, visit http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/faculty/cappelli.cfm

Time for a book report…actually, two….. by someone I admire a great deal in the Human Capital space: Peter Cappelli.  In the first of two posts this week, my thoughts on The India Way, written by Peter along with Wharton colleagues Harbir Singh, Jitendra Singh and Michael Useem. Published earlier this year by Harvard Business Press, it’s a great read on the ways in which leadership happens in Indian companies and the insights that we can glean from a different approach.

Despite infrastructure challenges, strict rules and guidelines to be maneuvered and the challenges of multiple cultures and religions, India has become a force to be reckoned with in recent decades; Cappelli and his colleagues capture this unique approach to doing business.   Based on their research and their interviews with more than one hundred executives, The India Way is a “must read” for leadership development professionals in particular.

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