Social learning is a key theme in this week’s review of what’s been happening in learning and development (L&D). Martin Couzins shares some links.
Social learning
This is an emerging focus for L&D, which is reflected in the programme of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s HRD conference in April.
Head of talent and organisational development at The Big Lottery Fund Perry Timms is facilitating a panel discussion at the conference on learning in the social workplace. Timms reflects on his workplace learning and the impact that social media tools have had on it.
At last week’s Social Learning Conference in London, L&D professionals heard from Nick-Shackleton Jones, head of e-learning at BP, about the lessons he has absorbed from building social learning platforms. You can see Jones being interviewed here.
Terry Jones, head of L&D at BT Openreach, provided his summary of the conference in a short interview. He said that the ingredients for an effective social learning strategy were the right technology, great content and the right culture.
HR consultant Jon Ingham moderated the conference and blogged about his opening statements, which caused some debate on the event Twitter channel. In his post, “Making people like them people like us”, Ingham presents the idea that we need to build relationships with people outside of our immediate sphere in order to create groups in which we can learn effectively from each other.
Picking up the social theme, Mike Collins reflects on his experiences of social learning in the enterprise and provides some great tips for L&D professionals in “Warning, social network ahead”.
In his post, Collins links to a post by Sam Burrough on why L&D needs to understand content curation, a concept discussed widely at this week’s Social Learning Conference.
Finally, Accenture provided a case study at the conference on putting social learning into practice.
Coaching
Last week, XpertHR published results from its 2012 employee coaching survey.
Although eight employers in 10 use line managers as coaches, many have concerns about their competence in this area, the research says.
The survey shows that the five most common uses of coaching are to:
- improve employee performance;
- develop leadership skills;
- help employees progress in their careers;
- tackle poor performance; and
- help employees achieve their own particular development goals.
The European Coaching and Mentoring Council held its London Symposium this week. Executive coach Catherine Sandler shared her thinking on using psychodynamic approaches to coaching.
Views
In last week’s round-up, I linked to a post by L&D manager Sukh Pabial. This week Pabial has written a post which describes the changing nature of his role.
Picking up on this theme of the changing L&D landscape, at this week’s Social learning Conference, BP’s head of learning Nick Shackleton-Jones said that the 70:20:10 model for learning (70% in experiential, 20% in coaching, and 10% in the classroom) was descriptive, not prescriptive. He argued that it was not there to be followed dogmatically, rather it should be used as a guide.
Jay Cross expands on this point in his post, “Is 70:20:10 valid?”.
And, in Reimagining Learning, Clark Quinn takes a fresh look at the learning process. Quinn looks at learning as a set of activities rather than a progression of content.
Craig Taylor, a solutions consultant at e-learning provider Epic, is running a session on YouTube for Training at a UCISA event on using social media in training.
Taylor is using a “flipped classroom” approach to his session, meaning that he is creating and sharing a lot of the content on YouTube prior to the event. If you are interested to see how YouTube can be used to develop learning content then you can follow, and get involved with, his work:
There have been two great posts on content and context this week from Steve Wheeler, associate professor in learning technology at Plymouth University. In “Content is a tyrant”, Wheeler argues that the internet works better as a space for sharing than a repository of content. He then expands his thinking on context and how we make sense of content online.
Learning management systems
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Finally, in the world of L&D technology, it has been announced that Cornerstone is buying Sonar 6.
And, if you are looking to develop your learning management system, take a look at “Buy or build?”, in which Jane Bozarth examines whether it is better to buy or build a learning management system. You can get involved with the Redtray initiative to help creating the LMS Wish List.
