Two weeks ago I signed up for an online course hosted by Harold Jarche and Jane Hart of the Social Learning Centre. The class: "From training, to performance, to social" seemed to fit perfectly with my desire to learn more about social learning. It was a great thrill to find that 39 of the 41 learners were from outside the States. What an opportunity to share ideas and be heard by other practitioners in the learning field.

We started out with the basics of training. Training can only solve a knowledge or performance issue, if there is a different issue in the workforce training is not the answer. Next, we discussed the ID models of ADDIE, ISD and whether or not they were still applicable to today's rapid pace of information sharing. The next assignment was reflective about how we solved an issue we had with a co-worker, was training the answer? Yesterday's assignment was on Narration of your Work. I had never heard of this concept until Harold explained that it is making your tacit knowledge (what you feel) more explicit (what you are doing with that knowledge). I listened to a short video by Dave Weinberger where he explained Public Learning. He used an example of software developers searching online for solutions to problems they encounter. The developers generously share information, even though it may be with a competitor, because knowledge should not be owned. I found the concept interesting. Dave believes there are tremendous benefits to the entire ecosystem when everyone shares the knowledge they've gained.

One of Harold's last quotes in the Narration your Work topic is that we should focus on helping each other to turn narrating our work into a habit. He believes in the future it will be the norm to share what you are up to. Formal documentation and stream of private emails that is current output of most knowledge workers is not going to cut it going forward. We need to think about how we can move towards that culture.

Okay, so here's my first step in moving towards that culture.

My Work day - Friday, July 20, 2012

Arrive at work and scan email, respond as needed and then dive into one task before our staff meeting: reviewing an internal PowerPoint. Because we are presenting to our peers I wanted to add a little something special so deliberated about using prezi. Completed review of PowerPoint and headed to 2 hour meeting.

Social Media Updates - after the meeting, I visited Feedly to see what interesting posts I could add to our FB and Pinterest account next week. I found some options and used Hootsuite to schedule. I use IE for this activity because I usually run into issues with loading graphics. Chrome is worse for this tasks but IE crashed again today so after shutting down for a few minutes, I completed this task.

Video Review - for one of the classes I'm working on, we video-taped several of our executives. I reviewed the final versions from the YouSendIt site to see how they looked. We had been concerned that maybe they would be too long but nope, only 2 were 3 minutes long and the other 10, were under 1:30. This will be perfect for our class because we are experimenting with Flipped Learning for this class. We will send out several videos and a pre-class survey in order to alleviate most of the lecture and allow our learners to spend more time working on the concepts, rather than listening to them.

Internal PowerPoint - I tried several attempts at creating a Prezi PowerPoint by next Tuesday. It seems easy enough to use, but after an hour and no real gains, I figured I didn't have the time.

Lunch at my desk as I scheduled appointments for next week.

I was scheduled to sit in on a demo by Splash Media to see what kind of marketing we could use for our social media efforts.

Social Learning Centre - I read through the Narrating Your Work topic and considered attempting to use Storify like one of the participants had done. Considering my Prezi path earlier in the day, I went back to my blog...which hasn't seen my fingers in over a year. I enjoyed this first go at work narration. I'm going to add it to my calendar for next week. Thanks, Harold!

Since I don't like blogs without pictures, I've included one of my office building here!