I spend a lot of time thinking, writing, speaking and working in my own personal and professional venn diagram of: leadership development; social collaborative tools; and all things related to learning. One of those pillars — the learning space — is where I started my career. I owe much of what I have today in my professional life to the learning space, be it K-12, higher education or the corporate sector. But it’s the corporate learning sector in particular where I believe a new ‘learning arc’ must be developed. It must shift from Status Quo Ante (as was before) to Ad Meliora (toward better things). Two of my dear friends and colleagues — Marcia Conner and Kerry Brown — were thinking the same way and
learning 2.0 Archive
There are those who can’t avoid the temptation of beer, salt and sugary snacks at night and there are people like me who treat new learning and collaboration platforms infectiously. I wish I could turn my eyes away from these calorie-induced sites or applications, but I just can’t. Perhaps at the core I yearn to learn, but that’s another post for another day. Let me introduce you to my latest microbrewery friend, Learnist. Brought to you by the makers of Grockit – an online social learning test prep service for items such as GMAT, SAT, ACT and GRE – Learnist is an attempt to crowd-source knowledge, information and content into a manner that is a cross between Web 2.0 sites like Pinterest, YouTube, Wikipedia and
Best Buy, a renown electronics retailer perhaps better known for its khaki pants and blue shirt dress code, could be viewed analagously with that of an evolved corporate learning structure. Imagine that you’re at one of their corporate stores. What do you see when you enter the store? There she/he is, the greeter: “Hello sir, how are you today?” As you pass the greeter in this vivid, brightly lit and humming environment there are a number of learning sherpas … the guides on the side not pestering you to buy something, rather, able and available when you require assistance. There are no commissions at Best Buy to make a sale. Employees are there, quite literally, to help you as necessary. Sure, it’s a formal environment with walls, electricity and so on, but it is
The higher education online learning gloves are now officially off. Let’s first recap the dizzying pace of change, announcements and launches that have occurred since the Fall of 2011 between Udacity, Coursera, MITx and the latest free-learning darling, edX. October 10 – Official launch of Introduction to AI (origin of Udacity) as well as Introduction to Databases and Machine Learning (origin of Coursera) December 19 - MITx is announced January 1 – Charles West Ventures invests $5m into Udacity (or is it Know Labs?) January 23 – Professor Thrun officially announces Udacity thus breaking away from Stanford February 20 – First official Udacity courses launch - CS 101: Building a Search Engine and CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car March 5 – MITx launches first course 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics) April 18 –