Our second meeting of the Learning Innovation Network was held at Merrill Lynch from October 21-22, 2008. The photo below shows our group getting ready for a series of break-out exercises describing learning in their organizations over the next 5,000 days—or in the year 2020. We wanted to start with a visionary exercise to explore just how different the world of learning in both corporations and universities may be in the days and years to come. Three forward looking trends discussed by the group include the following: 1.) Learning will continue to be ubiquitous and mobile technologies will become a dominant delivery mode. In the UK, there are now more mobile phones than people. For every 100 Britons there are 116.6 mobile phones. According to the GSM—Global System For Mobile Communications Association we will reach 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions by the end of 2008 and close to 20 billion by 2020. Think about this: how many of your colleagues do you see carrying two devices—one for work and one for fun. At our meeting, the Merrill Lynch team shared their successful implementation of MoBull: Go Learn, their mobile learning targeted to bankers on-the-go. 2.) Learning will be embedded into our everyday lives and will be boundaryless. Knowledge management will give way to developing a social media strategy for sharing information and tacit knowledge. Venkatesh Rao on Enterprise 2.0 blog writes a great article on this subject. The bottom line of Rao’s thesis is one to consider as we think about re-imagining our learning departments. Rao believes that Knowledge Management is a dated concept conceived by Boomers (those born 1946 - 1962) just as they were moving into leadership positions. Social Media, on the other hand, is a Millenial/Gen Y (born after 1981) movement and because of the efficiencies inherent to it, will dominate how we share knowledge and best practices as we move into the future. 3.) Learning professionals—from chief learning officers to heads of talent management must focus first on being strategy driven, rather than customer driven. We had a lively discussion at the Learning Innovation Network focused on how we are moving from being customer focused to being strategy focused. This is becoming an important distinction as learning professionals move toward delivering learning closely aligned to the strategies and business priorities of the organization and beyond "responding to individual customer needs. " The goal in this is to transform learning into a strategic function which contributes significant business impact through the acquisition, development and retention of top talent. Interested in learning more about the Learning Innovation Network? Send me an email at Jeanne@newlearningplaybook.com Technorati Tags: Chief Learning Officer, Talent Management, Enterprise 2.0, Mobile Learning, Knowledge Management

My stepdaughter Deborah is a graduate of Yale’s School of Divinity and she called me yesterday in utter amazement. She could not believe what she was reading in Yale’s Alumni Magazine—that Dean Joel Podolny, the current Dean of Yale University’s School of Management, had been hired away to serve as the Dean for Apple’s own university program. It turns out the allure of working at a company with an unmatched reputation for innovation and excellence was a strong enough draw to pull Dean Podolny from the halls of academia to re-invent learning for Apple. The scope of Apple University extends from Apple’s internal learning programs which are targeted to Apple employees, to a wider series of educational programs targeted to end users on the subjects of such basics as how to use Logic Pro and Final Cut Studio, to newer initiatives such as Apple Computer Camp for primary and high school students which is now offered at Apple’s retail locations. While Apple University was launched in a more traditional fashion over ten years ago—I still remember visiting and interviewing them for one of my books on corporate universities—the vision now is much bigger and bolder than ever: to launch what Apple has called an "internal MBA program" as well to merge Apple University with Apple’s existing iTunes University, which serves up educational content to the public. In conducting research for my new book, I am starting to see how many companies, regardless of their industry, are entering the "learning business" as a way to develop deeper bonds with their end users while taking a more proactive role in shaping the types of skills and competencies that are needed for success. You might ask why these companies are continuing to enter the education business? Here are some thoughts: What it means to be successful at work is changing and much of the new wave is focused on tapping tacit knowledge. Research conducted by Dr. Robert Kelley of Carnegie Mellon University queried workers with the question: "what percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your mind? The answers have varied significantly over the last 20 plus years. In 1986, it was 75%, then in 1997 (the year the Internet began to take off in the business world) the answer was 15-20%. Now in 2008, it is 8-10%. Imagine how a Millennial manager will answer this question in 2012? I just returned from two weeks in India and in that country, companies like Infosys are taking proactive roles to ensure leaders are teachers and the "business of Infosys is the curriculum." Infosys wants to access tacit knowledge in topics such as techniques for achieving operational excellence and driving innovation—concepts that are career specific and need to be reapplied to new problems by emerging leaders. Hence, the focus and vision to create a robust cadre of "Leaders As Teachers" has taken hold at the company. Lines are blurring between content developed for learning programs and those that are developed for marketing and communications targeting end users. Savvy Chief Learning Officers are starting to recognize this and are building alliances with CMOs to work on understanding what can be re-used and re-configured for a wide variety of new audiences starting with internal employees, but extending to customers, suppliers, dealers, end users and even primary and high school students considering careers in specific industries. So good luck Dean Podolny! I am sure you will have great success re-imagining learning for millions of Apple fans like myself. Interested in learning more about the research being undertaken for a new book. Send me an email at Jeanne@newlearningplaybook.com Technorati Tags: Apple, Yale, Chief Learning Officer, Infosys, Carnegie Mellon University

These days, hardly a week goes by without hearing about another company cutting jobs. The chart below shows just how pervasive the job losses have been just since September 15th 2008. It puts the transformation of human resources & learning into perspective: I showed this chart to several colleagues who are Chief Learning Officers for professional service and financial service firms to gauge the impact on their functions in light of the current economic situation. We discussed how the learning function will evolve in the months ahead: Three areas surfaced as keys to grappling with the current economic situation: Targeting the top three initiatives HRD leaders can accomplish in 2009 assuming fewer human resources and corporate learning staff and budget decreases of up to 40%. This translates into having a razor sharp focus on a critical few initiatives that will deliver the highest impact to senior executives. Some include: more emphasis on creating "formal" on the job experiences to nurture informal learning, having an enterprise wide coaching and mentoring strategy in place to supplement whatever formal learning can be offered and preparing managers to "have difficult conversations with employees". Providing a range of "real time" online performance support tools to managers. Previously these tools have been created for jobs in such functions as customer call and operations. But now that formal learning may be reduced, more managers and newly appointed leaders will be looking for performance support tools as a way to assist in creating on-the-job improvements. Examining how to leverage current content vendors to provide greater pre and post learning experiences—in other words exploring how to deepen some vendor relationships to provide learning interventions rather than just creating access to online content. How are you adjusting your learning department to the new realities of driving greater effectiveness and efficiency into the learning function? Share your thoughts with me. Technorati Tags: Chief Learning Officer, Performance Support Tools, Pre and Post Learning

Twitter has made headlines in some amazing news stories; breaking the news of China’s earthquake and helping a student get out of jail when he was arrested in Egypt for nothing more than taking a photo. Both of these incidents speak to the growing popularity of Twitter, but you may have the same questions I do: what is Twitter, who uses it, and can be harnessed as a learning tool? Twitter is a free social networking tool that keeps people connected with one another and with sources of information. Twitter users submit updates, called "tweets", about what they are doing at the moment. Tthese updates cannot exceed 140 characters. Now how many folks are using Twitter? Twitter traffic is currently at 1.2 million users per month. These users are mostly male, young, and profess to be heavy users, saying they go on Twitter at least 6-8 times per month. See the demographic breakdown of users below: Now, can Twitter be used for learning & development and if so how? Here are some ways for you to consider: Provide real time learning nuggets to either current or prospective employees When you look at the demographics of usage you see it is heavily weighted toward the 18-24 and 25-34 age ranges. These are the Millennials and Generation Xer’s that companies are interested in recruiting as next generation leaders. It seems there can be a host of applications for recruiting new hires as well as providing knowledge to follow-up a learning event. Follow-up to asynchronous webcasts Twitter is a great tool for communicating and asking questions on conference calls and other types of static asynchronous conferencing. The added benefit of this is that using Twitter to connect allows you to keep a record of all the questions and comments, in a manner similar to a blog post. Reinforcement or reminder on learning a new process or procedure In a saturated world of content where the shelf life of knowledge keeps growing shorter and shorter, we are always looking for ways to reinforce new content. Twitter can accomplish this because it allows you to see quick snippets of content. However, it is also important to note that while real people write most tweets, some are using the service for blasting marketing messages. In the later case, I believe users quickly see through this and look for authentic content to help them be more successful on their job. So how are you using Twitter? Is it a viable tool for learning and development? Share your thoughts with me. Finally if you are on twitter, be sure to "follow" me at: http://twitter.com/jcmeister Technorati Tags: social media best practices, web 2.0 enterprise 2.0, learning & development

Twitter, a social networking platform used for microblogging, is a free service that lets you send the briefest of messages (with a maximum of 140 characters) to everyone in your network. It marries the mass appeal of blogging with the speed and ease of text messaging. There has been a growing interest in how to use these new forms of social media for learning & development. Driving this interest is the fact that Millennials, or those born after 1981, make up 22 percent of the workforce now and will grow to comprise 46 percent of the workforce by the year 2020. This is the generation that is most likely to be using Twitter. According to comScore, Twitter had almost three million monthly users as of June of 2008, which is triple what it had last November. In addition, those figures probably undershot the mark because they don’t measure mobile activity, which is a large part of the Twittersphere, as can be seen in the graphic above. So given this level of activity, are companies using Twitter to it’s fullest potential for learning & development? The chatter following my last post on the subject does reinforce the view that human resources and learning professionals are experimenting with Twitter as a training tool. This is of interest because of the usage among Millennials in particular, as well as the fact that Twitter is a free service being used by millions of people of all ages. Below are some of the possible uses for Twitter as a training tool from the "wisdom of the crowds": Reminders of upcoming training events and reminders of key learning content Pre-emptive help for learning a new process or procedure Links to new articles of interest Online performance support tools communicated in 140 character limits. Most felt this requirement of 140 characters was a "good thing" in pushing training directors to be succinct about follow-up tools. Seminar/classroom attendee communications sharing a relevant point of view Team communications allowing employees a real time archive to how the team is progressing and issues they are encountering. They can also set up and install the twhirl application at their workstations so they can monitor what is going on. New hire training where new hires are invited to webcasts or conference calls on relevant issues they are dealing with on the job. Twitter has gone mainstream over the last year. At the end of 2008 summer session, a congressman from Texas, John Culberson (R-Texas), was told by House leadership to stop Twittering his constituents from the floor of the chamber. Next, you may be getting a tweet from your CEO asking how you will use Twitter in your department. If you are on twitter, be sure to "follow" me at: http://twitter.com/jcmeister Happy New Year to all! Technorati Tags: Social Media, Twitter, Online Performance Tool, Heads of Human Resources

By all accounts, mobile learning, termed "m-learning", is on fire as a new method of accessing learning. As seen in the chart below, m-learning may be the learning tool of the future: I see three trends fueling this new interest in m-learning: More companies will explore mobile learning as an increasing number of tech-savvy Millennials enter the workforce and insist on the speed and mobility of m-learning. The Millennial generation, or those born after 1981, currently represents 22 percent of all workers. However, by the year 2014 they are expected to represent almost 47 percent of the workforce. . More content will be available via mobile learning. See, for example, the recent news about Intuition: "Intuition, a leading provider of learning services to the financial markets, life sciences and government sector, today announced that it has partnered with edCetra Training to jointly market the ability to distribute learning content through mobile devices. The agreement will increase Intuition’s product awareness and provide it with greater penetration of the training and development industry." As more mobile devices go mainstream, such as Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, consumers will become accustomed to reading content on a mobile device. Over the last year, sales of Amazon’s Kindle have reached more than a quarter million units. What do you think? Are you exploring Mobile Learning? Technorati Tags: Mobile Learning, M Learning, Heads of Human Resource, E Learning

The results are in for the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s survey of 2,253 adults: validating what we have seen in the workplace, adoption of social media is soaring with one third (35%) of American adult internet users having created a profile on an online social network. This is four times as many as three years ago. The results break out by age in the following manner: 75% of online adults 18-24 have a profile on a social network 57% of online adults 25-34 have a profile on a social network 30% of online adults 35-44 have one 19% of online 45 to 54 year olds have a profile 10% of online 55 to 64 year olds have a profile 7% of online adults 65 and older have a profile Now consider when these social networking tools were introduced and their number of registered users to date: MySpace 2003 250 million registered users Facebook 2004 150 million active users Classmates.com 1995 50 million registered users LinkedIn 2003 30 million registered users Plaxo 2002 20 million registered users It’s about as addictive a method of communicating as I have ever seen. Last week I gave a session on this topic at ASTD and here were some of the questions posed by our audience of soon-to-be adopters of social media in the learning department: How do I build the case for using social media within my company? What about issues of privacy and security? What type of metrics should I focus on? Some thoughts that were addressed during the session: Is your CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) using socials media with customers? If yes what has been your company’s experience? Are your competitors using social media either internally or externally? What has been their experience with this? What types of pilots can the learning/HR department sponsor? Send me your comments! Technorati Tags: Social Media, Social Computing, Millennials, Chief Learning Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Pew Research

Research is starting to show that students who listen to lectures on podcasts are showing high retention rates. This finding was reported in ReadWriteWeb and was uncovered after conducting research involving a test sample and a control sample of students. According to Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, students are learning more by listening to podcasts of lectures than going to class. To find out how much students can learn from a podcast, McKinney’s team created a podcast from an introductory psychology lecture course. The podcast contained both audio and video of the slides used in class. Here’s how the research was conducted: Half the students (32 of 64) skipped the class and listened to the podcast only. The other half attended the class in person where they also received a printed handout. A week later, the students were tested on the material. The Podcast listeners did better than those who were in the class and those students who did both: listened to podcast and attended the class achieved the highest scores. While this is only introductory research, involving one single lecture and conducted among a sample of volunteer students who received an iTunes gift card of $15 for their participation, it does say a lot about how Millennials want to learn- on their own time, in nuggets with the ability to "play back" a section of a lecture they may not have understood the first time. This notion of listen once and play back multiple times is an important part of learning that is often overlooked. What’s interesting to me is that similar studes are being conducted in corporate learning departments using mobile smart phones to deliver training and performance support. The results are similar: learners who can "control" when, how and where they learn and use a portable/wearable device have higher completion and retention rates. Are you experimenting with new ways to deliver learning and performance support? If so, share your lessons here or send me an email. Technorati Tags: Millennials, podcasts, iTunes, corporate learning

Back in November I first wrote about the emerging potential of iTunes University as a vehicle for learning, when Yale University Dean Joel Podolny joined the Apple team to serve as Dean of their own learning system. This past February I wrote about iTunes U once more, as new research was released which confirmed the power learning via this method as university students who listened to podcast lectures received consistently better test scores than those who didn’t. One University in Australia, however, is taking this a step further, and is now offering college credit to high school students who watch video footage of lectures on YouTube. Professor Richard Buckland of the University of NSW in Sydney, Australia, wanted a way to allow high school students who lived too far away but were capable of handling college level programs, to actually attend Buckland’s classes by watching videos of his lectures on YouTube. Though students go through a rigorous selection procedure, if accepted, they must not only watch videos on YouTube but also hand in other work assignments in order to receive the transferable college credit which is of no cost to them. And, of course, only those accepted to the program receive the credit, but once the lectures are up on YouTube, they are freely available to be streamed by anyone. This is another example of Open Learning-how will this impact corporate universities? Right now many companies are creating a Youtube version behind the firewall to share "how to lessons," will taking an entire course on YouTube be next? Share your thoughts here. Technorati Tags: YouTube, eLearning, Higher Education, Corporate University, Chief Learning Officer, Corporate Learning

According to the Nielsen Online internet marketing and research firm, social network and blogs have become more popular than email: As reported by eMarketer and CNET, after rising steadily in recent years, in this past year, social networks and blogs for the first time ranked ahead of email in the Nielsen Online study. This means that more people are now using interactive and open-user social networking and blog related interfaces than email. See the chart above for the specific numbers. What’s more, time spent on social networks and blogging sites is growing at over three times the rate of overall Internet growth, according to eMarketer. Additionally reported this week in Business Week, growing your social network on Twitter can actually result in new business. Chris Savage, CEO of Wisita.com claims 12 new clients this year because of how he has used his network of followers on Twitter. What does this have to do with corporate learning? A few questions for you to consider: How does this growth in social networking lead to an increasing emphasis on social learning? As more learning happens in communities and with peers, what will be the impact of formal training programs? Will they begin to add "open source wiki’s," as pre or post work? A number of companies are already creating their own "internal" versions of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. It seems to me this will only grow as more Millennials enter the workroce and demand these tools at work to increase their productivity. Let me know in the comments or by emailing me at jeanne@newlearningplaybook.com. Technorati Tags: Social Networking, Social Media, Corporate Learning, Millennials