The Learning Strategist

Finally, we have a community in India exclusively for Instructional Designers. A great initiative by Ram, Rupa and some other Instructional Designers, to bring together this community and collectively function as an organized body. The ID Community had their first successful meetup at Bangalore last month. You can join their community in LinkedIn to learn about their activities. They have also published a list of FAQs for people who want to be part of the community. I think this is a much needed initative in India and I hope many of you join them and make this initiative a success. I wish them the best of luck!

Information isn't owned by an individual but by a community. Jane Bozarth is right in her post on Who Owns Information? Here's a fantastic video to prove it: I love the concluding lines that say 'In the past you were what you owned', 'Today you are what you share'. What do you all think?

Collaborative learning, (I prefer collaborative as it seems more like an organization thing than social) basically informal learning , is the way to go today, and yet we seem to have so many questions coming up: How can we get it to work to really bring value to the organization and the customers? How can you ensure it is used the right way? How do you ensure authenticity of information that is critical to the organizations goals? All very valid questions to ask while we are still bordering on the implementation of the collaborative learning project, and trying to measure what value it would bring after implementation. It is possible to convince management that collaborative learning would work for the good of the organization, just like brainstorming and knowledge sharing sessions did in the traditional models. The advantage here is the time saved on those meetings, and converted into information accessible through the medium of Web 2.0 resources. These resources have proven outside

Tony Karrer raises a valid point in his post Social Learning Measurement : eLearning Technology. Just the point I was thinking of after wanting to have a social model implemented in my own organization. It seems very interesting and attractive to have means to access information informally on-the-job and have it exactly when you need it. But I see the following challenges in the implementation of social learning at workplaces: - How do I ensure the information is organized well enough for an individual to access it when needed? The search feature has to span across all available information resources related to the subject to give me what I need. - How to ensure the authenticity of the information? We are in an organization dealing with real customers. Hence we can't take the risk to goof up based on something written in a social learning network. At a high-level I can imagine a reviewer/moderator model being implemented where all of the information entered is validated by experts

After reading Beyond Kirkpatrick by Tom Werner, and Jane Bozarth's post on Alternatives to Kirkpatrick , I was satisfied to hear that there has been effort to better the evaluation process. This is the kind of information I was looking for when I posted Kirkpatrick's Four Level Evaluation Model , knowing that people would have tried, tested and evaluated the model by this time. I did receive feedback supporting Kirkpatrick's model from John Pasinosky, Richeek and Geeta Bose. All of them supported the model and said it had worked well for them. John Pasinosky said: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- I have tried to incorporate the 4 levels in my instructional design practice. It is very valuable if you don't have any other plans in place. ( - In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king!). The good part about it is less that you can make a better product than that it gives you a framework to know what went wrong when it do

This months Big Question is about Stuck?Getting Unstuck? Stuck, is exactly how I feel, and the reason I started blogging and connecting with people. My blog becomes a forum to get my ideas out. So there's the problem and the solution right there! But come on now, don't we all feel stuck at different points in our work or even personal life? Well, being stuck is very much a reality as anything else, and I've felt this way many times before. Each place I worked posed different kinds of challenges, but to get to the point, here we're talking about being stuck in your organization with a lot of great ideas about how to improve things around you and the service you deliver to the customer. There are several reasons why one gets 'stuck' so to say: Your organization is just very happy doing what they always have been doing as it earns them money anyway. Your team members, who drive a lot of the initiatives because they've been around longer than you, just don'