Suggestion for Hootcourse on "The New Learning Architect"

In a few weeks time there will be a #lrnbook chat about the book "The New Learning Architect" by Clive Shepherd, that I will participate in.

Our course leader @britz asked a question on Twitter today on how to divide the reading of the book over the course period. Here is my suggestion:

1. We skip the Profile chapters as these deal with one individual per chapter. I am not sure if it's interesting to discuss these peoples work.

2. This is how I would chunk the chapters:

1. Week 1: Introduction, Time for a rethink, One more time, how do people learn?
2. Week 2: A contextual model for learning, Top-down learning, Bottom-up learning
3. Week 3: Formal learning, Non-formal learning, On-demand learning
4. Week 4: Experiential learning, Putting the model to use

Ok, that is my suggestion. Take it or leave it :-)

Thanks for taking the time,
Mattias

Change of behavior - Response to @janet_frg

Earlier today I participated in Marcia Conners (@marciamarcia) webinar on "The New Social Learning". It was a great seminar with a lot of interesting points. During the webinar there was also a backchannel discussion going on at #newsociallearn. During the session Marcia got a question on how Social Learning can create behavioral change. To me that seemed like somewhat a strange question. So I threw out a tweet saying:

Isn't the goal with all learning, social or not, behavioral change? 

It didn't take long before I got a question what I meant with this tweet from Janet Laane Effron (@janet_frg). Here is our conversation:

Three reasons why some companies are scared of Social Media.

For some time now there has been a lively discussion about why so many companies are not allowing Social Media to be a part of their employees IT-environment. After reading the great book "The New Social Learning" by Marcia Conner and Tony Bingham I have learned how to respond to the skeptics of Social Media. I have used these tips a number of times when discussing these issues with different people from different companies. And to be honest it has worked every single time.

But as these discussions pops up again and again I started wondering WHY so many companies (or actually people within these companies) have these attitudes. Because if we really want to make a change I don't think it is enough to have answers to questions. I need to understand where these ideas come from in order to really work with the needed change.
So let's start with the first reason:

Reflections after the "Stupid Bloody System (Jävla skitsystem in Swedish)" seminar

Last week I attended a seminar at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden. The title of the seminar was "Jävla Skitsystem" or in English "Stupid Bloody System". It was facilitated by Jonas Söderström who has written a book with the same title as the seminar. The sub heading of the seminar was "Cognitive stress from today's fragmented digital work environment - the users' view" which in many ways sums it up quite good.

In the seminar Jonas talked about how users get frustrated by badly designed IT-systems and how that can be a major influence of stress in the work life. I think we have all experienced how some systems we use in our work can be quite frustrating to work with simply because of the way they are designed. Jonas gave us some examples of systems that were just plain stupid.

Reflections after Learning Technologies 2011 Part 3

In my attempt to reflect on my goals with visiting Learning Technologies Conference in London last week I have now come to my third and last goal. For those who don't remember the third goal, here it is:

To get ideas on how to strengthen our L&D department in terms of brining value to the business.
   
I will not go into details on how the department I work in is setup and how we need to change, this is important to remember as some of the things I reflect on here isn't really based on my current job. It is more a general reflection on how any L&D department need to work in order to be at their best.