Live the Dream First of Learning & Enterprise 2.0

Dream dreams

Then write them

Aye, but live them first

                                            Samuel Eliot Morison

While in Boston recently I took the opportunity to walk through the Commonwealth Avenue Mall; a sublime 32 acre park designed with French boulevards in mind.

Throughout the Mall lay several statues. Although I hadn’t a clue as to who Samuel Eliot Morison was, the quote above stuck with me as I strolled onward and eventually meandering enough to take in a Red Sox game.

The relative success of Learning 2.0 & Enterprise 2.0 in your organization can be mapped back to this quotation. We all can dream the dream of a successful Learning 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 environment, and we all should be writing down what it looks like with appropriate benchmarking, metrics, cost/benefit analyses, etc. 

The aforementioned ensures you are following the tried and tested hierarchical processes that dominate organizations of today. In summary, you most likely will be tied to existing ways in which your organization operates when rolling out any Learning 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 initiative across your entire organization.

But, in the spirit of Mr. Morison, you could and perhaps should live those written dreams first by way of pilots, test audiences, trial runs, alpha/beta instances and the like in order to prove your dreams, get them into circulation earlier, and demonstrate that both Learning 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are not only for real, but can benefit the organization quickly and effectively.

Prove your dreams by way of any of the following:

  • Start a micro-blogging service using any of the free tools out there today
  • Append wikis & blogs to some of your ILT classroom courses
  • Prove that coaching or mentoring sessions can be equally as good in Second Life as face-to-face
  • When at a conference (attending and/or speaking) utilize the Twitter back channel and report back how it enhanced your experience
  • Use private features of YouTube or Google Video to boost the learning experience with video blogging

Of course there are many other examples we could illustrate but in the end, you easily can demonstrate small wins or beta examples of Learning 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 prior to rolling out the final and perhaps perfect panacea of your dream.

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Hey! I'd love to read what you think. Surely you have an opinion. Love, Dan.