a little knowledge is a dangerous thing

Learning & Development Roundtable

divento — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 11:29:55 +0000

This website has some great resources for L&D, current research and toolkits you can use for yourself.

Telling Stories

divento — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 15:02:52 +0000

Communication is all about change… how do you want to change your audience? The best way to change people is to get them thinking. Get them thinking by telling them stories:

1. Always have a destination, a 'Manchester'.

2. Begin in the middle – grab their attention by starting in the middle of the action

3. Use pictures to add interest and detail

4. Introduce possibilities with rhetorical questions to provoke curiosity

5. Re-introduce your message a number of times

6. Talk to these guys to get more presentation skills training!

Postmodern Irony

divento — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 15:22:16 +0000

Love this

Changing Faces

divento — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 14:49:33 +0000

So look at these faces and decide which is the more attractive – quickly!

The majority of people will say the one of the right.

Why?

Because most people only look at the left side of someone's face when judging someone's appearance… and the two faces are exactly the same, just mirror images of each other..

NLP Presuppositions

divento — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 12:00:07 +0000

If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. If what you are doing isn't working do something else..

There is no failure, only feedback; no mistakes, only results; no errors, only learning. Every experience may be viewed as an unprecedented opportunity to learn.

It is not what happens to you that matters. It is what you do with what happens to you that determines whether you experience the world as 'good' or 'bad'.

You cannot not communicate; you can only choose to do so unconsciously, or be conscious of the effects you create.

The meaning of your communication is the response you get, which may be different from the one you intended..

Ambient Performance – Mobile Learning seminar

divento — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 10:56:10 +0000

presentation videos are on their website now: http://www.ambientperformance.com/connection/

The knowledge pyramid

divento — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 10:49:21 +0000

Apparently – according to IDC research – we spend 15-30% of our time searching for information, and we are successful less than 50% of the time…

It's not information we need, there is already too much of that in the world, what we need is access to the right bits at the right time. It seems now that you the amount of information or knowledge you actually NEED to keep in your head for work is dropping – we just don't need to hold information anymore. Partly because it changes too quickly and partly because the way we retain information is changing – we can Google it, or look it up on our blog, we don't have to remember it anymore.. So we don't need to teach it in the same way.

workforce shift?

divento — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 10:42:02 +0000

A recent Mckinsey report found that the workforce is shifting – away from the old transactional type roles and more towards complex, ambiguous roles involving tacit knowledge and decision making.

This has led to the term 'knowledge worker' although I think it's a redundant term – surely all roles, tacit or otherwise, involve knowledge to a certain extent. I guess what it means is that as we work in increasingly complex matrix organisations with virtual commodities rather than clear hierarchies and physical goods then learning should evolve with us, away from the old-fashioned skills workshops and more towards tools that enable people to access that tacit knowledge better and faster.

Mobile Learning

divento — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 10:00:59 +0000

Yesterday was the mobile learning seminar, so here are some of the facts I picked up…

Baldwin & Ford (1988) and Ford & Weissbein (1997) researched into learning spend in organisations. They found that for every 10% of learning transfered to the job, $100 billion was spent. That seems a lot of money for a very little amount of benefit.

Jay Cross thinks we spend around 80% of budget on formal training, and receive around 20% benefit, whereas 80% of learning actually occurs informally, where only 20% of budget is spent. I actually think it's worse than this, as not many companies are investing in informal learning yet…

On-the-job learning is where most development takes place – I wonder how we can focus on this and channel all of that knowledge in a better way?