In the Social Learning group in LinkedIn, someone currently using Blackboard and exploring Moodle asked what folks thought might be characteristics of the next generation learning systems. Here's what I shared there, and thought might be worthwhile posting here as we..

Much of the Web 2.0 phenomenon has featured applications which are “people-centered.” Ning, Facebook, Twitter and others feature interfaces which center around individuals, and branch ..

As part of the preparation for Elliot Masie’s Learning Systems 2008 conference next week, Bill Bruck did an interview with Elliot. The pod..

I learn in three ways, and I want my learning system to support ..

As the CPsquare “Long Live the Platform” conference wraps up this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about “community” and its role within the enterprise.

Community is one of those concepts debated endlessly in circles ..

It's an interesting exercise. So far, there have been two present..

In his October report for the Gartner group, Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software, 2007,  Nikos ..

Dion Hinchcliffe did a pretty exhaustive survey of the state of enterprise 2.0 a couple of weeks ago.  It's a great read, if only to get a ..

I've been watching the rise of the social networking sites with fascination.  There has always been a bit of fuzziness (or violent controversy, depending on in which circles one is having the conversation!)  about what constitutes community in general, as well as about ..

There's a fascinating formal debate taking place on The Economist site this week. The proposition put forward is:

This house believes that ..

If the web-displayed email list is the oldest form of Web2.0 technology, the message board is probably the second-most venerable form of the read-write web.

For many web deniz..

September's big question on the Learning Circuits Blog is Where to Work? I think there are fewer questions that are more personal than what working environ..

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach posted a very thorough round-up of current thinking in The..

There's a bit of a tempest brewing over the behavior of John Mackey, CEO at Whole Foods. Seems Mr. Mackey was a regular on a Yahoo! financial forum, where, under a pseudonym, he talked up his company. He also used that pseud to cast aspersions on Wil..

As a professional who has spent most of my career developing technical tools to facilitate communities of practice and training, I think I can reasonably refer to my work as facilitating the management of knowledge. Mostly, I’ve been all about figuring ..

His low-tech representations of the workings of RSS and most recently,  ..

I have had may discussions about how hard it is to get a complex message across to decision-makers when you only can get five minutes of their time (sounds familiar?). To me this is probably the most important hurdle of modern management, and even more now as the young generations have the same behavioral patterns. it is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain somebody's attention for more th..

A new Forrester report predicts that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is going to increase dramatically. Over the next five years, that expenditure will grow at a compound annual rate of 43% This increase will include more spending on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS, with the end result be..

One of the most active conversations in..

In a Harvard Business publication Tom Davenport argues that E2.0 is the new expression for KM. This is good news for my book, until some ..

The self that grows up with multitasking a..

I'm fortunate enough to work at a virtual company that has been at the forefront of learning technology for 5+ years now. As a result, I get to breathe the rarified air of a group of people that truly enjoy innovation for innovation's sake, who are accustomed to asking questions (many of which begin with "why can't...), and who happily roll up their sleeves and dive in after the newest challeng..

The traditional approach to KM, dubbed KM 1.0, is about "deploying" specific knowledge sharing tools to be used for extra "above-the-flow" tasks of capt..

We are privileged to work with a number of companies who are known worldwide for their expertise in specific areas of management, sales, technology, and service delivery. Many of them have been recognized as "best of class" - sometimes for decades - in delivering training in their unique approach to what they do. What they all have in common is that while their world-class traini..

I had a really interesting discussion last Friday with someone I cannot name, and who is working for a French global company I cannot name either. After many failed attempts for the last ten years to establish a good knowledge management practice in that company, its top management apparently came to the conclusion that it was probably not in the company’s DNA, and therefore that maybe the comp..

One of the things I find most fascinating (and frustrating) about games is that typically you're not modeling an external goal-set, but are creating one out of whole cloth -- and thus one that the potential user must find attractive, engag..

Last friday, I e-mailed some colleague in my company to ask her for some information. This morning, I got a reply telling me that I should ask another person, and she gave me the name.
I find this behavior typical of the industrial age organization, where people define themselves by the tasks they have been assigned to. Whatever falls outside is not to be taken care of. In a post-industr..

(...)That looks suspiciously as if Facebook has begun to put the needs of its advertisers before the needs of its users. A dangerous sign and one..

Decide to network
Use every letter you write
Every conversation you have
Every meeting you att..

Yesterday, together with my colleague Ricardo Sueiras of PwC UK, we had a demo of Connectbeam the entreprise social bookmarking appliance. Connectbeam is an enterprise social networking tool using shared bookmarks and tags as a way to connect people. Basically it connects people who use the same content, on th..

I cannot say enough good things about John Hagel's Communities 2.0  post. It's a longish article, but well worth the read, both for folks who are actively involved in creating virtual communities and for those just trying to understand what communities are and how they can be used to fur..

Tom Haskins paints an intriguing picture in his answer to ..

For the first time in either Europe or North America, Big Content will be able to offload the tiresome and expensive work of copyright enforcement to ISPs and the commission called for by the ..

Boxes and Arrows has a great article by Michael Beavers on setting up business stakeholder interviews. While he's focusing on interviewing stakeholders for the development of a We..

I think we should put this into a broader perspective of people databases. For me, there are five different types of people databases used in major organizati..

One of the things I like about the computer is that when I acquire software for it that I decide later I don’t really need, the clutter the unneeded stuff creates is totally hidden away once I turn off the box.  This is not the case for dresses or household applia..

To hear some Web 2.0 enthusiasts tell it, “training” is becoming an outmoded concept. These days, anybody who needs to know anything can find it on the web. It is a new dawn for the autonomous learner.

It i..

I have to admit, I have a varied and checkered educational and vocational pedigree. I began my career as an aerospace engineering major, which has in some respects come in handy, in that I can, in fact definitively say something is not rocket science. 

Rocke..

Raph Koster has a fascinating slide show he presented to the 2007 Games Development Conference.  I like to keep a..

But simply telling people they have to carefully plan their communities of p..

Props to Jenna Sweeney at the Corporate Training and eLearning blog for highlighting "instructional interactivity" as a way in which to help learners gain knowledge in a way that will support their performance, not just meet the requirements of having taught them something.<..

I've been thinking about last month's Learning Circuits Big Question "What are the trade-offs between quality learning programs and rapid e-learning and how do you decide?" At Q2, we don't usually think about what we're doing as rapid e-learning (REL), since most REL seems to..

The answer, I told her, depends on what s..

Learning Circuits asks us to ponder our pondering this month. 

I love it when a group I'm a part of gets around to asking this question. It was one on which I was raised, by a wise mother of 4 little gi..

If we’ve been fortunate, what’s require..

Imagine, if you will, a community organizer taking the time and effort to identify important resources, create multiple opportunities for discussion, learn a new method for administering software, and opening up an online community with great fanfare...only to be met by..

The Learning Circuits  big question this month is “What are the trade-offs between quality learning programs and rapid e-learning and how do you ..

One of the key values we see in collaboration software is its ability to capture dialogue.

Which sort of begs the question, why do we need to capture dialogue? Isn..

Rosanna Tarsiero noted that John Smith, in his Yahoo group on ..

Pine and Gilmore (The Experience Economy) talk about the Progression of Economic Value - POEV - as a key to understanding what it is you offer. At strategichorizons.com, they say: One way to determine what business you’re in is to consider what you charge for: If you charge for r..

I'm a toolophile and I have *tremendous* latitude to try new stuff and see if it works for me, and might work for you other guys,  but y'know, I have all this stuff that has to get done on time and under budget and it's costly to try a new tool, find out it doesn't really work the ..

There's a huge unseen cost to Enterprise 2.0 within organizations which rely on the power of groups to produce results. Some of them include:

• Training: Who gets the average worker-bee who isn't the self-motivated learner up to speed on the variety of new tools that then ..

Who are the "knowledge workers" in Enterprise 2.0? Is it the 1,500 claim adjusters who make critical judgments that earn or cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars each year, or the 12 policy writers who develop new guidelines for the corporation? I believe in many cases ..

With no central plan, and no ant in charge (the queen never orders anyone to do anything), ants bump into each other randomly. But they have standards of interaction. Ants sample the other ants they meet to see what they are doing. They use pheromones as a standard way of comm..

When I talk to proponents of collaboration spaces in organizational settings, I frequently hear the same lament, "this would make everybody's life so much easier if they'd just use the space!

Having sung several bars of that song myself, I started thinking about so..

Shawn Callahan summarizes a point that Steve Denning makes in The L..

It's not the medium - list serves and blogs are both int..

In a very interesting research report, The Success of Virtual Communities of Practice: The Leadership Factor, Anne Bourhis, Line Dubé and Réal Jacob suggest that "decisio..

Tony Karrer points out that Tom King, formerly with Macromedia, has created a Google calendar for eLearning events which he says he will keep up to date by emailing him at: events@mobilemind.net. You can see the calendar for October..