Ever get tired of explaining how Wikis, blogs and social networking differ from each other? Here’s my attempt to explain it – very simply – by assessing these social media according to whether they are mostly used for viewing or for creating content, and also according to whether the focus of that content is mostly about people or about information.
It’s a Slideshare Slidecast that runs a little over 5 minutes. Click the green ‘play’ button to begin.
Yes, it’s true. Belmont Academicals are top of the league.
My Thursday night 5-a-side team has won its first two games of the new season, bagging us 6 points and placing us firmly at the top of the ‘Premiership’, the very pinnacle of all British 5-a-side football teams. Or at least, those playing in Turnham Green, London, on a Thursday night.
During our last spell in the Premiership we managed a miserable 3 points over 10 games, with an average of 2.3 goals per game.
I spent a very pleasant morning on Friday at Tate Modern, courtesy of e-learning provider IMC. After the normal registration coffee we had a fifty-minute tour of the Tate (or a small part of it, at least) followed by a discursive presentation from Prof. Stephen Heppell entitled ‘The Art of Learning’.
Now this is not your normal way of approaching a conference or a briefing. The normal drill is: turn up, drink some coffee, chat, listen, chat, leave. You don’t normally walk out of the meeting room before the main event to wander through an exhibition and hear an expert guide talk you through each a collection of challenging mostly abstract art.
And yet, strangely, it worked. Of course Prof. Heppell is an experienced speaker, with a great deal to say, all backed up by experience. One of his themes was the need to change our learning spaces in schools in order to change the way pupils learn, and he led a fascinating discussion on this.
The discussion, however, would not have been as wide-ranging, I believe, without the gallery tour beforehand. It acted as the equivalent of a mental warm-up, getting us out of whatever mindset we were in before we arrived, prompting us to look beyond the obvious, and to challenge our existing thinking.
This business of learning by walking about and chatting was absolutely in line with Prof. Heppell’s message, but I reckon that any event could benefit from a beginning that asked people to use their minds a little differently, on a subject matter which they would never normally encounter in their working day.
Is training dead? That’s the question I’ll be asking in my keynote at the Irish Computer Society’s National IT Training Conference in Dublin on 30th April.
Is it dead? No, of course not. It’s just evolving.
That, though, provokes some questions: what’s it evolving from? What’s it evolving into? And what’s causing the change?
Government funding for skills has been in the news a bit recently, what with the 2010 demise of the LSC (Learning and Skills Council) looming large and many sector skills councils facing the long, difficult process of relicensing to ensure they have funding for another few years.
When things get rough like this, the normal thing is to muddy the waters by producing another initiative, in this case many are speculating that it will be The return of the Individual Learning Account in some guise. The rationale: individuals, not governments, are best at deciding what to learn.
That would take another few years to prove a disaster, by which time ministers will have moved on and nobody be available to take the blame.
It’s not often that you have someone speak that generates the sort of reaction that Tony Buzan does. Everyone seems to have read and used his books – in particular Use Your Head.
In the run up to the conference, several people told me that this book and the technique of mind-mapping had changed their lives. In particular, I was told, they had realised on reading it that they weren’t stupid, that it was possible to learn in different ways.
Anyway, Wednesday, 28th January also happened to be my birthday. I didn’t say anything to the audience as I opened the conference - it’s my job to stay in the background. However, I had mentioned my birthday to Tony the evening before over dinner.
On wrapping up his presentation, Tony mentioned that this was an auspicious day. Not only was the Learning Technologies Conference 10 years old, but it was also Don Taylor’s birthday.
And he then led the audience of about 350 people in a spirited rendition of Happy Birthday to You.
It was a very happy moment, if slightly odd. After all, it really is my job to get everyone else into the limelight, but I enjoyed it and thanked the crowd.
Now it is late Friday afternoon, the weekend is here, and the conference is behind us. I am looking forward to relaxing a little and enjoying some postponed birthday treats with the family. But being serenaded by Tony Buzan wasn’t a bad way to start the celebrations.
Are people an organisation’s greatest asset? Following discussion on these pages and others, I have come to my own conclusions, but this is your chance to speak.
Over the weekend I enjoyed the podcast review of 2008 from Bill Kutik (http://tinyurl.com/82vzvm), not least because it mentions Salary.com pretty prominently for the first ten minutes.
The pre-Christmas wrap up of the year has Bill in conversation with Jason Averbrook and Corsello, discussing how Talent Management / HCM companies will fare in 2009. They also ask what on earth happened to Fusion?
I don’t normally deal with politics on this blog. I stick to competencies and software. This morning, though, I read news which will affect the UK and EU skills base, and I can’t avoid it just because it is political.
A Turkish publisher, Ragip Zarakolu, was sentenced to five months in prison after a judge ruled that The Truth Will Set Us Free, written by George Jerjian, “insulted the Turkish republic”. The sentence was under Article 301, revised in April.
The altered law banished the crime of insulting “Turkishness” and reduced the maximum sentence from three to two years. It also lay down that all prosecutions need prior approval from the justice minister.
What does all this have to do with UK and EU skills?
Welcome to Don's space for thoughts on human capital, performance and skills. What I write here are my thoughts alone, and do not necessarily represent the views of any organisation I am associated with.
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