Thursday, October 22, 2009

Making it happen

I have been reflecting on how to make individuals take responsibility for their own learning. A number of conversations with people over the last few weeks have hammered home the difficulties of getting an informal learning programme off the ground.

e.g. our firewall shuts off access to anything of value, our risk department would never let us delegate responsibility that far down the line, imagine if someone said something really stupid on twitter...

Within the informal learning blogosphere the response seems to be, "Quit moaning and just accept that the change has already happened. Traditional learning and development is already dead, it just doesn't know it yet"

And yet I don't hear of many major employers who have jumped the early adopter chasm yet (I would love examples to prove me wrong)

Which prompts two thoughts:

1. Start really really small. Teach two or three small groups how to use RSS feeds and social bookmarking and maybe just maybe blogging about their experiences
2. Start huge. Approach major employers and say, "You currently spend £50 million or £590 per head on training each year. Appoint us to run your L&D function and we'll save you 20% in the first year and improve the quality. We'll make ourselves redundant in two years leaving you with the capability to teach yourselves.

Hmmm.

1 comment:

Peter Edstrom said...

You might consider starting smaller. Many of the people I know get their updates from the evening news on broadcast TV. They only go to the internet for very specific, targeted things.

RSS solves a problem of wanting to read too many web sites. But what if they don't know or care about sites that might interest them?

Idea: Get them to cnn.com instead of TV cnn is step 1. Step 2 is broadening that with multiple view points from say nytimes.com and foxnews.com. Step 3 is expanding the topics to other areas.