And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in.
— Haruki Murakami
In a recent blog post, Susan Orlean documented a familiar occurrence to anyone who is a part of a social network.
I mentioned on Twitter that I didn’t mind traveling for work but hated having to organize and file my expenses. It was a pretty run-of-the-mill tweet, an accounting of life’s…
All relationships require attention. Amen.
Source: viafrank
This scarf makes me happy.
…for certain aspects of work and learning, encounters with peers or mentors, while no longer inevitable, remain invaluable.
— John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information
Good viewpoint on how to create engagement with participants even when participation is expected to be mixed.
When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.
— Lao Tzu
I am working on my dissertation research questions. I have been muddling around with social media & corporate education. I was going to do something around participation, maybe create an internal (Corporate L&D) “social media readiness assessment” (with the emphasis on technology).
Through my reading, I have come to conclude that participation is going to vary (maybe Hill/Nielsen 90:9:1; maybe the Pareto 80:20, which is the same as Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail”) This uneven participation is inevitable, and this is OK if you listen to Clay Shirky. On p. 125 of Here Comes Everybody he says, “the spontaneous division of labor driving Wikipedia wouldn’t be possible if there were a concern for reducing inequality” and it hit me that formal, corporate Learning & Development is to some extent focused on EQUALITY. We’re all about maxmizing SME output or other resources.
Is the real question right now how to rationalize the hierarchical, traditional corporate L&D with the unequal participation that is hallmark in “social” approaches? The success measures of a corporate university in which the Organization decides the what, when, where, why, and how of learning will be different from the success measures of corporate L&D fostering an employee’s ability to find what they need when they need it via social technologies.
