My co-author for the upcoming book, The 2020 Workplace, Karie Willyerd and I have some exciting news to share with you all: our article on innovations in mentoring is in the May 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review! The title is Mentoring Millennials and the article is part of HBR’s theme for this issue: How To Keep Your Star Talent. To read more and to order a full copy of the article, please visit Harvard Business Review’s website. The following is the introduction to the article: The makeup of the global workforce is undergoing a seismic shift: In four years Millennials—the people born between 1977 and 1997—will account for nearly half the employees in the world. In some companies, they already constitute a majority. That shift may sound daunting to the managers charged with coaching these young workers, who have a reputation for being attention sponges. However, our research into the varying expectations and needs of employees across four generations has given us a more nuanced view of Millennials and uncovered several resource efficient ways to mentor them. We polled 2,200 professionals across a wide range of industries, asking about their values, their behavior at work, and what they wanted from their employers. The Millennials, we saw, did want a constant stream of feedback and were in a hurry for success, but their expectations were not as outsized as many assume. That’s good news for organizations wondering just who will mentor this rising generation. Baby Boomers are retiring, and Gen X may not be large enough to shoulder the responsibility alone. In the U.S., for instance, the 88 million Millennials vastly outnumber Gen Xers, who are just 50 million strong. Millennials view work as a key part of life, not a separate activity that needs to be "balanced" by it. For that reason, they place a strong emphasis on finding work that’s personally fulfilling. They want work to afford them the opportunity to make new friends, learn new skills, and connect to a larger purpose. That sense of purpose is a key factor in their job satisfaction; according to our research, they’re the most socially conscious generation since the 1960s. The article goes into depth on three innovative ways to mentor Millennials: 1) reverse mentoring, where a Millennial is matched to a senior executive, 2) group mentoring, where the company sets up a technology platform allowing employees to create their own self-organizing groups on such topics as lead generation or leadership development and 3) anonymous mentoring which uses psychological testing and a background review to match mentees with trained mentors outside the organization.Exchanges are conducted entirely online, and both the mentee and the mentor, who is usually a professional coach or seasoned executive, remain anonymous. I would really enjoy your comments on the article and if your organization is using any of these types of mentoring, share with us here your results. Bookmark To:

Affinity groups have been around for some time in forward thinking companies. But now some of these companies are taking Affinity Groups to a new level: they are using them to crowdsource new products and services. Consider Best Buy: While sales in 2009 accounted for roughly 22% of U.S. consumer electronics sales, its share of sales to women was just 16%. Solution: Best Buy leveraged its Women’s Leadership Forum, composed of female Best Buy employees and female Best Buy customers plus a network of teenage girls to suggest new ways to sell to women. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported: The suggestions from these groups led to local businesswomen advising on retail strategy, and while others helped female Best Buy workers balance family and work demands. Most recently, the effort spawned a network of teenage female consultants who help the retailer sell phones and videogames to young people… Mr. Dunn and other top Best Buy executives are now behind the idea, seeing it as a crucial way to even the field against Target Corp. and Wal-Mart, where executives have long called their target shopper she. Bottom line, this strategy of using networks formed in Human Resources to crowdsource new ideas for sales is one of the many innovative approaches detailed in The 2020 Workplace, recently published by Harper Collins: The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today. Buy the book or visit our website for more info! Share with us if your company is leveraging groups-especially female groups to source new ideas to grow the business. I want to hear from you. Bookmark To:

I recently read this excellent article on crowdsourcing which explores ways in which the tool is expanding in different fields. Here are five of the best examples they came up with: GrouperEye: This "survival of the fittest" project was started by and for college students looking for contract gigs. Businesses post a case on GrouperEye’s website and leave it open to students to solve. The company picks the best solution, and the student who came up with the idea is paid. "This Is Your Brain on the Internet" Course: In the fall of 2009, Duke University professor Cathy Davidson started a new class called "This Is Your Brain on the Internet." It introduces students to crowdsourcing by letting them accept some of the responsibility of running the class, including grading and teaching. Crowdsourcing Help Desks: IT help desks are a necessary service on college campuses, as so many students depend on their computers and Internet access to complete their school work or even attend class online. At Indiana University at Bloomington, new IT help desks began implementing crowdsourcing to alleviate the cost and pressure of having to answer so many calls. Students and professors post their IT problems on an online forum, where other students and amateur IT experts answer them. SOS Classroom: This program has helped sustain the Los Angeles Unified School District’s summer school system. USC students — along with teachers and parents — designed and collected online educational materials to teach K-8 language arts and math to summer school kids. Much of the program includes volunteers. National IT database in the future: Notre Dame’s Chief Technology Officer Dewitt A. Latimer hopes to engineer a national IT database — powered by crowdsourcing — in the next few years. It would be based on the success of user-generated sites like Amazon.com and Wikipedia, and if the economy can get off the ground, the Hosted Integrated Knowledge Environment Project, or Hike, could become reality. What ways can you think of to use crowdsourcing in human resources & corporate learning? Are you using crowdsourcing in your department? If yes, how? What implications can you see for it? Share your thoughts in the comments section! Bookmark To:

There are some exciting things happening at the intersection of digital media, lifelong learning, and assessment.  Check out my latest GETInsight blog post on GETideas.org to read about the current HASTAC-Mozilla "Badges for Lifelong Learning" competition and ponder the future of information and formal assessment.Click here to read the blog post -- and feel free to add a reflection in the companion VoiceThread!

The archive of last week's webinar is now available at the following link.  Captions will be added shortly.Click here to view, "How and Why to Flip Your Classroom with VoiceThread." Mark your calendar and stay tuned for details about next month's webinar, "Making Sense of Assessments with VoiceThread," November 17th at 12pm PST/ 3pm EST.

Many new college grads are realizing is that their college degree is lacking an important proficiency: a social media presence.  A friend of mine recently graduate with his BS degree in Finance.  He had a great lead on a job at a high tech company and things felt promising.  But the feedback he received was, "Spend some time developing your social network profile and then our recruiters will consider you."  That's not something he learned in college.  But, arguably, it should have been.Why?  Because in a participatory culture, what others say about you is more important than what you say about yourself.  Step up, folks. It's time to join in. If you're on the social media sidelines, here are three simple steps to join in:1. Define your niche.  Everything starts with your niche.  If you imagined yourself on a stage, what are you speaking/singing/dancing about?  Why would people want to be in your audience?  Who are those people?  These are the people you want to connect with.  These are the people who want to learn from you.2. Start your LinkedIn profile, build your connections -- and, perhaps most importantly, get recommendations from your connections. 3. Create a Twitter account, start following interesting people who have something smart to say or share. 4. Give back.  Social media is a two-way street. Create a blog and share what you know.  This includes ideas, reflections, tips, strategies (in all formats -- writing, videos, PDFs, you name it!).  Tweet relevant, thought provoking ideas and resources (in the form of links).5.  Worried about privacy?  Then don't share private information. Go. Do it today.  Your future may depend on it.

I saw this infographic on Mashable this week and thought it was incredibly relevant to my previous post, College Students: Why Social Media Matters To You.  This infographic does a solid job of pointing out the potential for social media use to result in negative and positive effects on future employment. How are new college grads learning how to craft their social media presence in the most effective way?  Is this a skill that could or should be an outcome of a college degree?  Is your college's career services department integrating these skills into their workshops and other services?  And what about our online students?  I'd love to hear your thoughts and any related activities on your campus.

The Khan Academy has received extensive and impressive press this past year.  And recently, they've joined forces with Smarthistory -- signalling an exciting turn in open content and, more importantly, signalling a major shift in how we teach our students.The "brainchild" of Salman Khan, the Khan Academy is fundamentally a rich repository of effectively designed video lectures anchored in visually compelling annotative descriptions.  It's really good stuff -- and it's not just for math students/teacher.  With extensive funding from Google and Gates, the Khan Academy has branched out into new disciplines including biology and history.The compelling element of The Khan Academy is that its popularity is encouraging a rethinking of how educators spend class time with students.  If you're a regular reader of my blog, you know that I'm a supporter and practitioner of the flipped classroom model.  But I'm also an art historian -- and that's really what this post is about.About four years ago, I made a fortuitous connection with Beth Harris who, at the time, was teaching art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY.  Beth shared a blog post about a little known tool named VoiceThread -- which knocked me out of my seat.  It was Beth's willingness to experiment and share that inspired me to try VoiceThread and led to a spiraling of innovation and sharing in my own teaching practices.  I reached out to Beth to say thank you and she responded by setting up a VoiceThread and inviting me to collaborate with her -- and then with her college Steven Zucker.  Asynchronously, we conversed in a VoiceThread about Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait of 1434.  It was amazing and opened my eyes to so many things -- but most compelling was the potential of technology to break open the medieval traditions of the art history lecture, a rethinking of the role of an "instructor."Beth and Steven continued to follow this thread of intellectual curiosity and went on to create Smarthistory, a website based upon building a content resource for art history comprised of recording of unscripted conversations about works of art.  It's different ... and it's great.  Smarthistory describes itself as a "multimedia web-book about art and art history."  On the one hand, it is explicitly challenging the traditional 40-pound, $100 art history "learning" resource.  But it's so much more than that.  Listening to a Smarthistory dialogue does not explicitly tell you what you will learn.  Rather, it requires you to think critically about what you're hearing and synthesize and evaluate the content to form knowledge.  Smarthistory fosters the skills we all need to effectively navigate the mangled web of content we are entrenched in every day.Here's a sample: "Modeling conversations" is what educators need to be doing more of today.  And it's precisely that that I think is so fabulous about open content and the flipped classroom model.  When we "unlearn" how to lecture, we are forced to learn how to model conversations with and between our students.  This is a quote by David Weinberger shared on the Smarthistory blog:"Educators therefore face a different set of challenges. Very different. Their authority is in question since we’ve learned that we can learn more from talking with others than by listening to any single expert. But, more important, if knowledge emerges from conversations, then just about all our educational focus ought to be on learning how to be good conversationalists: how to listen, how to kindle a conversation, how to evaluate claims, how to speak in a voice worth hearing… and, most of all, how to share a world in which knowledge is plural, for that’s what conversation and knowledge is about."Congratulations to Beth Harris and her "smart" team.  Thank you for being bold, taking risks, and leading the way to new learning paradigms.  Can't wait to see what the future holds! 

This month I attended the 17th Annual Sloan-C International Conference for Online Learning in Orlando.  I have shared my reflections this month in a new GETInsight blog post.  I hope you'll join me for a discussion there!Wake Up! It's Time for an Online Learning Reality Check

The archive of my recent webinar, Making Sense of Assessment with VoiceThread is now available.*  You are also invited to join me this Wednesday, November 30th at 12pm PT/3pm ET for an interactive online office hour. Bring your ideas and questions for an hour of engaging conversation about using VoiceThread for assessment!  Participation is free but registration is required.*Transparency note:  I am currently consulting for VoiceThread as a Higher Ed Learning Consultant.  This is paid position.