Work, Learn, Play

Notes on people, information & learning

Posts Tagged ‘learning & development’

Save the date

June 10th, 2011

We have announced three Next Steps conference locations for 2011 — all in September. The first in Chicago; the second in London and the third in Bangkok. Please come.

At Next Steps you can network with your peers from different industries, share your best practices, provide your input into our new products, or just listen to how the latest developments in our enterprise knowledge, learning, assessment, compliance, and talent solutions can free up your people to do what they do best.

This year we will be offering a completely new NetDimensions Product Workshop on the second day led by our technical consultants and featuring two tracks with a total of eight different hands-on sessions. We invite you to enroll in this unique knowledge-packed training program to gain practical NetDimensions product insights that you can immediately apply in your own environments.

Come to the NetDimensions user conferences and let’s take the next steps together.

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Posted in People, Technology

Tags: corporate learning enterprise content management knowledge management learning & development learning process LMS

Compliance matters

April 5th, 2011

The Guardian, one of my favorite UK newspapers, just released an excellent, frightening article on Mexican drug cartels laundering money through an American bank, Wachovia. The drug money ended up in a lot of different places after winding its way through Mexican Casas de Cambio (money exchange and transfer services), the City of London and the world’s money laundering capital, Miami Florida.

One statistic that caught my eye was the amount of unchecked money Wachovia shifted from 2004 until the bank got caught out in 2010 — some US$378.4 billion, more than $4 billion of which Wachovia moved in cash. Some part of that total (the full numbers may never be known) was in effect, according to the Guardian, “no questions asked” banking services for drug dealers.

You can find the article here.

» Read more: Compliance matters

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Posted in People

Tags: Compliance future of LMS iPhone learning & development

Synergy 2011

February 15th, 2011

We just finished our start-of-the-year meetings in Hong Kong, Synergy 2011. Our resellers, who showed up in force, came from all over the world (you can find a list of NetDimensions resellers here).

Our resellers are a powerful, variegated group with clients large and small and up to the minute insights. They had a lot to say. I’ll share a couple of points that impressed me and give you a heads up on what our community is doing today and planning to do for the rest of the year.

In no particular order of importance:

» Read more: Synergy 2011

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Posted in People, Prognostications, Technology

Tags: enterprise content management enterprise learning future of LMS learning & development performance support

The Internet for the rest of us

November 26th, 2010

The folks at Google have written a book — well, I’m sure they’ve written a few (and indexed a few more) but this particular batch of Googlies have written a children’s book for grownups that explains how the web works to those of us who are, shall we say, technology challenged, which means most of us if we’re being honest.

You can find the e-book here.

And when I say “technology challenged” I don’t mean to be disparaging. I think even those among us who use the Internet every day may lack a deep understanding of how it actually works. For example, how many people do you know who can actually describe how a car engine works? I mean, how it really works?

The book is charming. Clear, concise, aimed at intelligent adults and beautifully illustrated, it’s a must read for all your learning and development staff who do not muck around with code but who might benefit from understanding more about web architecture issues. There is a bit of Googlie self-promotion in certain chapters but hey, it’s free.

Thank you Google.

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Posted in People, Technology

Tags: learning & development software licensing The Internet

In memorium

August 8th, 2010

Jonathan Kayes Portrait Jonathan Kayes just died. For most of his career, Jonathan worked with the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). More recently he held the post of Chief Learning Officer at The Masie Center.

My path first crossed Jonathan’s in a funny way.

I was having dinner at Indochine, a French Vietnamese restaurant in Hong Kong, with Elliott Masie of the Masie Center along with his wife Cathy and Graham Higgins, who was then the learning and development manager at Cathay Pacific Airways, when Elliott asked if we knew of any interesting learning or performance support innovations coming out of Asia. I mentioned Chinesepod, which was born during SARS, and was, I thought, a great example of necessity mothering invention.

Elliott liked Chinesepod so much he brought it to the attention of the CIA, where he was a member of the board of advisors. At that point Jonathan picked the idea up and ran with it. Chinesepod has since gone from strength to strength, as have a bunch of other online language learning services, including Livemocha and Smart.fm.

I had the privilege to meet Jonathan several times after that and even to introduce him to one or two officials in other (friendly) governments trying to figure out how to achieve some of the successes he had achieved in his CLO roles.

Jonathan was a serious, good man. We’ll miss him. I’ll miss him.

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Posted in People

Tags: learning & development

A bit of shameless self-promotion

July 29th, 2010

For the company I mean.

Elliott Masie just posted the interview we did on his Learning 2010 site.

He asked good, open-ended questions. You can judge how good the answers were yourself.

Listen to the podcast interview here.

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Posted in People, Technology

Tags: enterprise content management learning & development LMS

A different drum

July 21st, 2010

The good people over at Mozilla set up a spin-off called Drumbeat, essentially a peer to peer, open source, learning and development environment.

Two Drumbeat projects caught my eye.

The first, Universal Subtitles, is both a technology development project and a global learning initiative. To date 772 people have contributed to this project. Subtitles clarify a lot, even song lyrics in one’s native language. Speech-to-text transcriptions and follow-on translations (this is the universal part) cost money and take time. Easy, user generated subtitles mean that videos in one language can be leveraged out to any number of languages easily.

It’s a very cool idea with lots of implications for making video-based learning that gets pushed out globally.

The second project that caught my eye is the P2PU School of Webcraft, which aims to make a “vibrant, peer-led system to help people around the world easily access and build careers on open web technology.” The project bills itself as “the ultimate curriculum for open web developers” with ”a community endorsed certificate to show off your skills” and is an outgrowth of a course held via Peer2Peer University. The first intake starts in September. The proposed syllabus includes:

* Web 200: The Anatomy of a Page Load
* Web Development 101
* HTML5
* Building Social with the Open Web
* Reading Code
* Semantic Markup
* Organic SEO Basics
* What is PHP
* Drupal Basics
* Building Social Web Applications with Drupal
* Beginning Webservices with Python
* Designers Tackling The Web
* Principles of Project Management
* Introduction to System Administration
* Web Accessibility
* Designing for Education: : How to optimize the user experience.
* Extension Development
* Interactive games for the open web
* Scripting 101

This is serious stuff. It bears watching.

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Posted in People

Tags: Drumbeat e-learning learning & development Mozilla Open Source P2PU School of Webcraft Peer2Peer University Universal Subtitles

Out of gas or speeding out of sight?

July 19th, 2010

David Wilkins, a technology evangelist at Learn.com, recently published a blog post I thought worthwhile. A Defense of the LMS (and a case for the future of Social Learning) hits several nails on the head, including the ideas that (1) it is without a doubt easier to build social networking functionality into a mature enterprise system like an LMS than it is to build LMS functionality into a social networking application, and (2) LMS platforms are essential business applications in large part because compliance support is crucial, complicated and difficult.

He also makes the point that future learning cooks will want to throw everything but the kitchen sink into the mix — a shake of social, a pinch of old-school personnel records, a tablespoon of talent management, a cup of sifted reporting and repeated lashings of user generated content.

This is all true but I would add a couple of thoughts:

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Posted in Technology

Tags: future of LMS learning & development LinkedIn LMS LMS platform OpenID social learning social networking

Reading the signs

March 13th, 2010

The track of a typical eye movement across a screen or page of text

I am in the middle of a series of signage articles on Slate. The first article in the series, The Secret Language of Signs, is worth reading and got me thinking in a number of different directions.

One road it sent me down was the idea that we are always looking for signs that reinforce our feelings of exceptionalism, be they political, professional or personal. Being special seems to be a psychological imperative.

In the learning and development world, we go so far as to grant post-graduate degrees in instructional design, incorporating ideas from graphics, psychology, organizational behavior, adult learning theory and various bits of technology research and development, among other specialty areas.

» Read more: Reading the signs

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Posted in Technology

Tags: Blackberry e-learning iPhone learning & development Powerpoint Rypple Twitter Yammer

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