Tuesday 3 April 2007

veni, vidi, wiki


Or, as Julius Caesar might have said, "I came. I saw. I wrote it all up in my blog".
That excruciating title pun is probably only recognisable to the radio generation but the reality is recognisable to generation Y. There are an estimated 4 million bloggers out there. I wonder how many people are writing books? Not 4 million, I suspect. If Julius Caesar were recounting his saga of battle, murder and sudden death today, it could well be as a blog.

Here and now

Someone has already commented that these ideas will not really take root in the cold business environment. I disagree. These ideas fit now. We are still viewing the business environment through the filter of early generations. For confirmation check this article in today's Guardian newspaper.

I will be running a Blended Learning Workshop later this month (SkillSoft customers only, I'm afraid) and will use this blog to answer some of the questions that may arise afterwards. We can keep a dialogue going long after the formal event has finished and hopefully the learning will continue.

New tools for old ideas

It has always been possible to create a learning community to continue after formal events but it has not been as easy as it is now. Collaboration software like Sharepoint allows easy creation of dedicated environments for continued learning. In some ways it re-creates those largely long-lost days of residential courses when discussion and reflection occurred in the evening after the intense work of the day.

Working towards an end

When the idea of blended learning is introduced most people concentrate on the activity that takes place at the beginning. It is certainly true that this may be where the best cost-saving can be gained. By shortening the formal part of the event with pre-work expensive training time can be replaced by more effective and cheaper individual preparation. However if we consider the improvement in learning that BL can introduce this is much more likely to occur at the end of a course - an intervention that is rarely considered or addressed.

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