Podcast #1: Action Mapping

In this, my first podcast, I am joined by a small number of my organisations elearning authors, Steven Mahay, Geoff Owens, Andrew Pilkington & Chris Hyndman to discuss an Action Mapping session that I had just facilitated. The purpose of the conversation was to further promote the thinking that elearning is not just the traditional ‘click-next’ type of elearning that many of us are used to and that podcasting is a relatively simple (and far quicker way of producing a learning resource) whilst also providing a period of reflection for the attendees themselves. The podcast was also a great learning curve for me as I had failed to set my Samson GoMic as the default recording device so I was reliant on the internal laptop speaker, hence the poor quality…. but I’ve learned my lesson and hope that you will join me in my next podcast in which I will have resolved my ‘teething problems’

James Clay’s elearningstuff blog

Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping blog post

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Mapping Informal and Formal Learning Strategies to Real Work

During the Q&A at a recent conference session on Social Learning a retail industry attendee asked: “I have to train 300 store level associates in new product knowledge in the next three months.  Is social learning really what I want?” What would your answer be?

I advocate informal and social learning vehicles when appropriate and get as excited about their uses as you likely do, but it’s not a panacea for all our learning woes.  The current zeal around social learning solutions can distract from real performance needs (we’ve been distracted before).  Social learning gets positioned as the enlightened and “correct” solution for the modern workplace. Formal learning is old, tired, and reluctantly tolerated for the vestiges of the traditional, mechanistic workplace.

But, set aside your biases one way or the other for the moment and simply think of the roles and functions you support in your organization.  It will vary by industry of course, but your list is going to be some subset of the following:

..Please visit my new blog Performance X Design to read the remainder of this post and others.

Note: The Gram Consulting blog has been discontinued. I post blog introductions here to encourage former Gram Consulting readers to visit the new blog. All the Gram Consulting content, plus a bunch of new posts are on the new blog. Please come on over…

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