Sir Ken Robinson's most recent TED talk is a great validation of our approach at ThoughtWorks University. While Sir Ken speaks about education and I'm more a corporate educator and for long I've felt strongly against one-size-fits-all, factory style, conformant education. I've always been one for a pull-based approach as you may have noticed from my past blogposts some of which are below:Put your learners on a diet - consider a pull-based approachEmpowering learners in an Induction Program5 Simple Ideas to give an Edge to your Induction ExperienceLearning to Learn in the modern EnterpriseSir Robinson's talk has some great quotes that I want to share with you:"Education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep.""The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense, things that people think, 'Well, it can't be done any other way because that's the way it's done.'""You know, to me, human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability.""The other big issue is conformity. We have built our education systems on the model of fast food. This is something Jamie Oliver talked about the other day. You know there are two models of quality assurance in catering. One is fast food, where everything is standardized. The other are things like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized, they're customized to local circumstances. And we have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education. And it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.""We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process, it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development; all you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.""It's about customizing to your circumstances, and personalizing education to the people you're actually teaching.""It's not about scaling a new solution; it's about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions, but with external support based on a personalized curriculum.""Now, in this room, there are people who represent extraordinary resources in business, in multimedia, in the internet. These technologies, combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers, provide an opportunity to revolutionize education."Great speaking and great inspiration for those like me who believe in individualisation and diversity. We need to give our learners credit for who they are and move away from one-size-fits-all training. Instead, let's find an agricultural model that works for the enterprise. More about this when I post about ThoughtWorks University next month. Thanks Sir Ken - this is great ammunition to support my thoughts!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

It looks like yesterday’s blog post on my first reactions about Google Plus have sparked (Pun intended) a bunch of interesting feedback, all over the place, from plenty of folks out there, ranging from perhaps a bit too much excitement, or just plenty of hype or simply going far too far stating that G+ could eventually become *the* social networking tool that would rule them all. Fascinating insights, for sure! Thanks much, everyone, for sharing them along! While I am trying to keep up with all of them sharing across some additional feedback I thought I would go ahead though and put together this blog post sharing one additional thought that’s been in my mind ever since I started using Plus a few days back. Is Google Plus a Vitamin or an Aspirin? My good friend, and fellow colleague, Louis Richardson, is a tremendously engaging public speaker with an amazing talent in delivering key, powerful messages in various different topics; one of them being Social Business. So a couple of months back he put together this brilliant presentation on the topic of Ideas @ Work that he has blogged about over at The Collaboration Soapbox and that I can strongly recommend you watch through, if you can spare 24 minutes of pure gold. It’ll be worth both the time and the effort spent in it, for sure! One of those ideas that Louis mentions on that presentation that I actually find quite thought-provoking is how most organisations would need to look at social software within a business context. Living social for the sake of social alone is not going to take you very far. Quite the opposite. You probably wouldn’t even go beyond the One Year Challenge. However, looking into how social can help you become better at what you already do, at how you can improve your overall business performance, your employees’ productivity, engagement and morale, as well as your talent management strategy, your business revenues, your customers’ satisfaction and whatever other indicators would certainly put you on the right track towards embracing social business fully. But he then comes to ask the key question about social business and social software tools: Are you looking for a vitamin or an aspirin? Basically, are you trying to find a quick fix for that long lasting headache you have been suffering from for a while, or are you looking for that vitamin that would make your business even stronger? Now, this may well seem a rather trivial question, but in reality, it isn’t. It’s the one that defines what your own social business strategy would be about: trying to address a business problem with a temporary patch, hoping it will go away or rather prepare yourself to overcome those business problems before they become a real issue in the first place. It’s rather interesting, to say the least, but I am seeing that very same analogy with my use of Google Plus and the overall Social Web. Initially, after the first few days of use I thought G+ was the perfect aspirin for me to get rid of the good number of headaches I have been having with various other social networking tools. Now, don’t take me wrong. I am not saying that social software is problematic. Not at all. What I am just saying is that most of our social networking tools available out there are lacking in one way or another to provide that unique social experience we all know it’s possible to achieve at some point. In yesterday’s blog entry I hinted what some of those problems were and I stated some of the main reasons as to why I was excited to see G+ being the aspirin that addressed and fixed all of those different issues. However, while I keep making extensive use of it, I do realise, more and more, that Google Plus is no longer the aspirin of The Social Web (Yes, it’s addressed quite nicely most of my pet peeves with a good bunch of social networking tools!), but rather that strong vitamin you take to improve that overall user experience with social tools. Yes, yesterday I mentioned how we are just talking about iteration #1 of G+, but most of us are already seeing the huge potential. Let’s face it, if you think of it as an vitamin that you take day in day out, imagine what it would do to your connections and your networks in say, 4 or 5 or 6 years, like some of the others have done so far. Somehow G+ is starting to feel more like that vitamin the doctor recommends you take to remain strong at working through your daily routines and improve your overall health status. And I must confess that after a few days playing with it, I see plenty of healthy interactions taking place. As a starting point, I’m seeing much more profound, engaging and lasting conversations with my core networks that I never thought I would be able to develop in other social tools, unless meeting face to face. Secondly, I’m finally seeing the huge benefit of tapping into the weak ties in a meaningful manner through various Circles, without having to struggle to make sense into it, like with some of the others. And, finally, something that is starting to make me feel even more excited about it all. And that’s the lack of sense of guilt for being unable to get the most out of my social interactions when I know I could, but that due to technical implementations, hiccups, bugs, issues, and whatever else I was always falling short behind. Google Plus has become, to me, at least, both that aspirin that fixed the temporary headaches I have been suffering from using other social networking tools and that vitamin that will surely help me continue to cultivate and nurture better relationships with those folks I care about by having more meaningful and engaging conversations without having that feeling of being on the losing end all the time. In this case, I think things have shifted around nicely and we are about to embark on the winning end of The Social Web. Now, I do realise as well that we are at the beginning stages and we would all have to wait and see how things would pave out eventually. It’s Google after all, the one behind it, so we may need to wait for a few months to see how things would turn out, but the start, you would have to agree with me, is rather promising. Something we couldn’t say from several of G+’s counterparts when they first started up themselves. I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that things won’t mess up and that it will continue to grow healthily for us all, proving there is a way to live social out there on the Web without us, social networkers, feeling the pain, but rather the opposite: enjoying the experience! (Oh, by the way, in a follow-up blog entry to this one, the third and perhaps final one of the series, I will be sharing one other additional thought on what, to me, is the killer feature from Google Plus that many folks haven’t talked about just yet… something unique that no-other social networking tool out there is providing at the moment and that I think would highlight the future of social networking, both within the enterprise and further beyond… Stay tuned!)

"It's easy to sound smart, when you parrot the wise" - Someone I can't remember.I have absolutely no remorse in saying that most of my ideas are not original. In fact I don't even believe in originality. To me originality is the fine art of hiding the source, which unfortunately I'm crap at - so I like to give credit to the sources I steal from. After all, isn't synthesis one way of way of expressing your creativity? I'm stealing another idea today, but before I tell you what that idea is let me tell you what I'm trying to do. Until sometime in 2008, my blog was just a catch all for everything that made it's way into my stream of consciousness. Since then, I've made a concerted effort to focus this blog on issues related to modern learning and development. We're halfway through 2010 now and before I write anymore, I wanted to provide my readers a map to this blog. This is also my way to reiterate the how I think about L&D and where I as a practitioner see things going.So what's the idea I'm stealing? I loved Tom Kuhlmann's format where he provided answers to frequently asked questions about rapid elearning. I have no pretensions to being an expert like Tom, but I do get into a lot of conversations in the community and I often get asked questions too. So I'd love to use a similar format to explain how I think and to give you a map for the content on this blog. Given how much of a common man I am in the learning industry, this is as close I'll get to an interview! Incidentally, I have over a 100 links that I'm sharing through this and the next blogpost - so keep track of them! In fact for your browsing ease, I've also catalogued them on my delicious bookmarks. Allright, these are going to be fairly long blogposts so I won't waste any of your time - let's get going.I confess to being an L&D industry common man. I work at ThoughtWorks, a company that defies traditional theories of management, as director of workplace learning. Of the many things I do, I run one of the best graduate induction programs in the IT industry - ThoughtWorks University. As part of my technology education background, I have a strong bias for free and open-source software, though I'm also a hard-core Apple fanboy. You'll often see me as a participant on various webinars. I tweet using the handle sumeet_moghe and here's my Linkedin profile.The most important thing you need to know about me is that I hate being a one trick pony. In fact, I prefer being a learning generalist, more appropriately a versatilist. Having said that, you can't take me too seriously because I'm neither a researcher nor an academic. I can't vouch for the statistical accuracy of what I write or profess. All I can say is that what I write is true for me and my experience.To be very frank, there's only so much I can do as an individual. I think there's heaps of interesting stuff happening all across the industry and I'm particularly interested to see how people are using their skills to solve real business problems. So that's the reason I like attending webinars. Now the reporting's a completely different story. You must remember that I'm not the only live blogger out there. In fact, I've taken inspiration for this from Cammy Bean, who's just fantastic when live-blogging events. She's just so good that it's impossible to match up the number of events she reports and the quality she brings to her reporting. I'm just following her lead trying to share what I learn in each of these events with the rest of the world.There's a lot of interesting stuff you'll see on my webinar reports and conference reports. There's over 30 different events where I've learnt interesting stuff ranging from Ruth Clark's approach to scenario based learning, to Jane Hart's approach to selecting a social learning platform. And then there are brilliant experience reports by folks like Steve Ash and Lars Hyland, so I think that there's a lot going on with the webinar circuit that deserves reporting.I don't think I do a very good job of keeping up. I have a 12 hour day at work on the best days and there's very little time I have otherwise to stay abreast with everything in the industry. That said, I think over time I've learned how to learn and all the informal networks I'm part of, are helping me grow as a professional. In addition, some thought around how to structure my personal knowledge management framework has helped, so when I do dip my toe into the river of information, I end up making the dip fruitful!First things first, I like to believe that there's a shift happening in the way we collaborate on teams. This is not to say that things have turned on their head, but I definitely think that there's a change in the control structure and the dogma around the best ways to collaborate. I still love face to face communication (who doesn't), but I like to believe that if you can't collaborate without being colocated, you're perhaps not agile enough. There are so many great tools that can help your team collaboration soar, that you need to keep your eyes open for things that are changing in the technology space.Well my views on presentation skills have evolved over time. To me, the McKinsey Mind quote, "Presentation is the ‘Killer Skill’ we take into the real world. It’s almost an unfair advantage."; is an indication of how important this craft is. To contrast that with the amount of slideumentation we see in the corporate world, is depressing to say the least! This said, I don't think it's rocket science to do good presentations. If you plan effectively, choose the right tool for your presentation, use simple techniques to create meaningful visuals, and avoid some of the common mistakes, you should be well and truly on your way to matching Steve Jobs!Yes and no! I started off my career as a training facilitator and that's perhaps my strongest skill even today. I look at training as a distinct discipline from presentations, so while media skills are crucial to training, they aren't all training's about. As a trainer, the biggest virtue you can have is patience - you need to believe that your learners can do it! You need to know how the brain remembers, the effective use of language patterns in the class, ways to encourage participation and to handle QnA. There are various subtelties in being a trainer. For example, competition lends momentum to training, but how do you ensure that people learn to collaborate amongst all the fun? Another example I love to talk about is around the issue of entertainment in the classroom - how much is enough? As a trainer I'm always looking to improve my skills in leading socratic discussion, eliciting well formed outcomes, reviewing concepts effectively -- and student feedback always helps. After all, it's a performance of sorts and we need to ensure that it's of the highest quality.Again, most of this is experiential and I can't vouch for the academic authenticity of my opinions. I'm big on rapid design of any kind. Back in the day, I was thinking about rapid instructional design with Powerpoint and I've come down that road thinking how we can apply Agile principles to elearning design as well. There's however an aspect of this which I'm extremely passionate about - the role of an instructional designer. I strongly believe that it's not about the tools - creativity is key. The typical elearning projects are late, poorly designed and just don't solve performance problems. We need a breed of passionate instructional designers, who have more skills than just writing. When we start leveraging our SMEs effectively instead of looking at them as barriers to our instructional process, we're likely to produce high quality outputs.Why just elearning? If we're creative enough we can not just apply them to transactions such as simulation design, but also solve complex problems like induction. But coming to the topic of elearning - I like to apply the rapid paradigm. On this blog I've demonstrated that it is possible to produce elearning on a shoestring. It's important to remember that you don't need to do everything within elearning - you need to find a way to integrate all of the rich media from the web. If you're big on rapid elearning just in the same way that I am, you should take a look at my 6 tips for rapid elearning success. In addition, pay attention to meaningful interactivity, your navigation scheme and your information architecture and you'll find that it isn't rocket science to create high quality, yet low cost elearning. This brings me to the end of this blogpost - in my next post, I'll cover off other stuff that I usually write about. Do let me know if you like this map to my blog. I'll look forward to your commentary.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Continuing further with that series of blog posts on the topic of Google Plus, I thought I would ahead today and share a third one, which I thought was going to be, originally, the last one for now, but then again things have come up and there will be another one that I will be sharing next, where I will talk a little bit about the topic of Circles and share a couple of thoughts on how I am managing them and their flows.  But for now I will spend the next few minutes talking about what I would think is the killer feature from Google Plus, at least, one of them, that you hardly ever see on any other social networking tool out there on the Social Web and which I think is probably going to be one of the main key success factors from G+: bridging together too irreconcilable worlds. Ray Wang already hinted it earlier on today on a recent tweet that I thought captured it, half way through, very nicely: "MyPOV: The thing that #googleplus #google+ has right is the Unified Communications. The communities will come as a result. #socbiz #e20" and then developed further on this really insightful Google Plus discussion with a bunch of other folks. The overall sentiment is that G+ may not be ready just yet for a full implementation of unified communications and I would probably agree with that statement. But what I think G+ provides us with is a new breaking ground that no other social networking tool, at least, till now, has dared to bridge just yet: combining both online (As in real-time!) and offline interactions. Yes, that’s right. If you take a look into some of the most popular social networking tools within the Social Web, hardly any of them provide full support for real-time, online interactions; with today’s Facebook announcement we may have the first exception. However, for the rest everything happens offline or in semi-real time, which in most cases, for a certain number of interactions and use cases, is not enough any longer. In a fast pacing world where most of the action happens in real time it’s a pity to see how we keep missing this bridge of combining the best of both worlds. But here comes Google Plus, packing together, quite nicely, a whole bunch of features that help us combine both of those worlds and get the most out of them. On the one hand, we have got Google Talk, nicely integrated into Google Plus, which means that you can go ahead and fire up an Instant Messaging chat with your networks with just a single click. Then for those folks who heart Gmail, we are starting to see how G+ is getting nicely integrated in there as well with the Notifications pop-up box and all. But perhaps the killer feature from those online, real-time interactions is going to be, of course, you have all guessed right, G+’ Hangouts. Indeed, plenty of folks keep saying that video, and videoconferencing, is going to be huge, if not already, as perhaps the next frontier for effective online collaboration amongst small groups, where instead of just typing away, you would just do a single click here and there and off you go with your webcam talking away with other folks. Well, Google Plus would allow you to do just that, with a single click, and with up to 10 people of your social networks and that is something that no other social networking tool has even attempted to do. But it gets better… It gets better, because, even though I haven’t tried it out just yet myself, I have been hearing and reading from a whole bunch of other folks from my own networks, who have tried it out already and they have loved the experience, for how smooth it is and what high quality the rendering of the video is so far, which I think is rather interesting, because, in my opinion, it is going to help improve the way we collaborate online. How? By enabling audio (voice) and video right into your social streams. And here is the kick of it all. I am myself a rather fast typist, learned over the years and all, like probably most of you folks out there as well, but still I talk much faster than I can write and that along the combination of body language would make for a perfect collaborative environment where I need to get the job done with a small group of people in a short timeframe and somehow I still think that seeing is believing. After all, we are all visual animals. However, what I really like about this bridging of these two irreconcilable worlds from Google Plus is that for those hangouts you can set them up yourself on purpose, inviting others to join, which is really good on its own already, but you can also join random hangouts of people who are in your network(s), who you may know really well, or not that well, but still having them at your reach for a video conversation with just one single click would enable something that I have always found very empowering and engaging from any social networking tool: facilitated serendipitous knowledge discoveries resulting in a constant and rampant social learning experience! Can you imagine? You are just going through your G+ Streams and all of a sudden you see a hangout from a couple of folks from your networks who just got it started and since you have got a few spare minutes you decide to join in and BANG! the conversation kicks off and it blows you away! Remember that golden combination of both strong and weak ties? Well, imagine combining both of them in a single hangout, using video, to converse, connect, share your knowledge, collaborate both with a purpose or perhaps just for the sake of it. Who knows. The key thing is that feature *is* already available, right as we speak! Which means that if you are lucky enough to have a G+ account you would be able to test it out right away. If not, you may need to wait till July 31st, when Google will go mainstream with it for everyone and open Google Plus. Now, while you muse about it for a little while longer, imagine what that would mean when you think about going mobile and what this would represent… Yes, I know, truly mind-blowing! The richness of interactions, wherever you are, no matter what, taken into a whole new level! The fine line between offline and online, real-time interactions will be a thing of the past! If not already! You may have embarked yourself in a rather fascinating and perhaps a bit too complex conversation in one of the threads and in order to finish off, before you all go crazy, you click on Start a hangout, invite those folks and finish off the conversation, right there! Priceless, specially if you are stuck on a particular issue that you need to develop further more than just a few words. I am not sure what you would think, but the potential is just huge and it IS already here! Now, finally, if you combine that set of features to incorporate video and audio into your streams, but also available elsewhere from where Google may be planning to integrate G+ with I think we have got a winner and if I were Skype, amongst several others, I would probably start worrying about it a little bit, because somehow I, too, can see myself, with a whole bunch of other people, shifting gears and moving to Hangouts, vs. Skype, more than anything else because the entry point is just low enough for me to not have to worry, that is, click on a button, start the conversation! And all of that without having to even know your Skype ID. Like I have said in the last couple of blog posts, the more I continue to play, experiment, learn, and enjoy Google Plus, the more I am convinced it’s going to be huge. It just probably needs some time from us all to let it mature and grow healthily, to perhaps give it some time off adding further pressure on it and let it keep innovating adding new features and enhancements on what I think is one of the main premises for social networking tools: reach out to those who you care about, stay connected, converse with both audio / video AND text, share, learn, cultivate and nurture your social networks as a result of it in an efficient and effective manner. The one that matters to you and your network(s). A win-win situation, in my opinion, if you would ask me, and, like I said, if you look into the potential growth from an integration point of view, along with the world of mobile that Google seems to be so good at, I do think we have got a new kid in town that very soon is going to grow into a rather smart adult in the social networking space integrating for us all a bunch of various different interactions that so far were just too scattered around. And that would make things just so easy for us all, don’t you think? Click, click, done!

Forget social learning, collaboration and what not - here's what Google Documents is great for. Ordering ice cream for the team!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

At the beginning of the series of blog posts on Google Plus that I started earlier on this week I mentioned how I would be putting together about four different articles about my first impressions on playing around quite a bit with G+, something that those folks who have been following this blog for a long while now would know it’s not something that I do rather often, so you can imagine how it is starting to grow on me more and more by the day. You could say I am having a blast with it, to the point where most of my other external social networking activities have gone a bit dormant in the last few days! I do realise though how I still need to post that fourth article and all, but I thought I would go ahead talk about something else today: the value I am getting from Google Plus already on my first week of usage. Because I guess that’s what we all care about  at this point in time, right? What (business) value do we want to get from G+? We all remember that social for the sake of social is not going to take us anywhere. So how am I benefiting from making use of it at the moment? Well, let me summarise it with a single sentence: facilitated serendipity on steroids! Yes, that’s right! Earlier on today I had the great pleasure of experimenting some more and play with some of the various different features from G+. If a couple of days ago I mentioned how important and critical the combination of both real-time and offline interactions would be like (See "Google Plus - Bridging Together Too Irreconcilable Worlds") today I had the mind-blowing experience of trying out Hangouts with my boss, another one with a fellow IBMer, and another one with Paul Jones, who is going through a truly fascinating experiment I am hoping to talk about very soon, as it relates, quite a bit, with my own mantra of living "A World Without Email". But more on that later on … Anyway, like I was saying, the experience of the Hangouts was just utterly surprising and very re-energising. Fantastic, to say the least!! Having an opportunity to do a simple video conference with the highest quality on both video and audio fronts is just priceless, even more when that videoconference can host up to 10 people concurrently without a glitch! Well, I know now that with that blog post I mentioned above I fell short, very short, on what I think is going to be the killer feature from Google Plus at this point. And I keep hearing lots of great things as well about Huddle, the one other feature I still need to play with! So this whole Hangouts experience surely has got a very clearly defined business value, at least, for me: connect, reach out, share your knowledge and collaborate with those folks who you share a common affinity with! Your social networks. But it gets better, because earlier on today, while most of us are still trying to get the hang out of Google Plus, so plenty of the conversations are still around how do we do what in G+ without going crazy, we are starting to see plenty of golden gems come afloat amongst those conversations that are starting to make it worth while hanging around for a little while longer. And I thought I would go ahead and share with you folks one of them I bumped into myself earlier on today, that I think you would also enjoy it yourselves. It’s a short video clip, very witty, sharp, straight to the point, hilariously funny, very engaging and fun to watch, put together by my good friend Kevin Jones, which makes for some perfect viewing before the weekend kicks off: The video clip lasts for a little bit less than three minutes and in a very refreshing and truly entertaining manner Kevin reminds us all why it’s worth while paying attention to Social Technologies, experiment with them, find out our sweet spot and use cases and figure out whether they would be providing us with an additional value add that we can incorporate into our overall productivity, effectiveness and business performance, or not, and his point on the importance to overcome fear and embrace change is just brilliant! In a way, the whole spirit permeating through the video clip is just proving the point of why a whole bunch of us are exploring Google Plus at the moment, to see whether it’d be another social networking tool we would be adding into the mix, or whether it would replace a few others, or, just simply, whether it would stick around. Keeping that open mentality towards it certainly is one of the strongest points from this video and one of the reasons why, for yours truly, Google Plus is here to stay. At least, for me. Even thoughit will redefine the whole strategy of how I make use of social tools out there on the Social Web. Next I will be sharing that final blog post on the concept of Circles and how I am using them, but first I would encourage you all to have a look into Kevin’s video clip and if you still want to have a play with Google Plus, leave a comment over here, including in the comment form your email address, and I will share along an invite. I have been sending a bunch of them already today… A few more wouldn’t hurt, I am sure! Come and join us! The waters are lovely! Let’s keep plussing and trying out these social technologies!

I started writing my previous blogpost under the impression that I was going to be able to finish in one go! As it turns out, I have said too many things on this blog, so providing a map to all those things in one little blogpost is close to impossible. So I'm carrying forward the work from the previous post. If you aren't familiar with the format I'm using - just read the previous post and in the mean time I'll cut to the chase.I'm glad you use the word 'context'.  A lot of the social learning patter these days seems to focus just around the cool tools we see all around us. While the tools are crucial to the success of social learning, it's important that we consider other factors too. OTOH when selecting a platform, we need take into account when the tools actually do matter. Speaking of tools - I recently wrote a blog post about 6 social learning platforms that you can enable on demand. The one thing I'll mention though - please don't fall into the trap of creating walled gardens. Consider the little things that make a huge difference; for example, metadata.Given my background as a training consultant, I know for a fact that a vast majority of people think of a training magic wand that'll make their performance problems disappear. As consultants however we need to be pragmatic and determine if training really is a solution. Our current performance problems need us to think beyond trainer mindsets, and we need to avoid being one-trick-ponies. There's a huge people angle to developing learning strategies. Firstly, all people are not the same - I like using the Dreyfus Model to plan how we can involve people at varying levels of expertise. You may also find my learning paths approach useful, so you can avoid the pain of big-upfront training. Most importantly, we need to devise our strategies to be pull-based, so we don't keep creating overloaded, one-size-fits-all-but-fits-none approaches to learning. I like approaches where we empower our learners and let them think for themselves like adults.I'm hardly an industry commentator to answer this question - but let me take a shot. If there's one word I want to focus on, it's versatility. L&D people in today's age need to wear multiple hats. If there's another word I want to focus on, it's creativity. We're beyond the point where one specialist can solve business problems with a known solutions. We're getting to a point where business is so fast that we're encountering problems we've never seen before. So I can't say much about the 'state of the art' except that we need learning generalists who can approach problems creatively, by applying diverse perspectives and heuristics.Those are quite a few things to comment on arent' they? I have a huge interest in how people work together. Working at ThoughtWorks has been a revelation for me. At ThoughtWorks, working with people like Patrick Kua has made me realise what an important place feedback has in helping people grow. A few months back I piggy-backed on some of Pat's posts and wrote a post of my own about about building a feedback culture. I completely understand that in the absence of the right culture it's tough to give and share feedback. To make it easy I recommend separating the 'what' and 'if' of feedback and treating all feedback you get as a gift. Yet again, if you're in a situation of conflict, you may want to try the technique of percepual positions to evaluate the situation from different perspectives.I also have a strong interest in being a student of leadership practice and HR. You'll notice that from my unending rants on the history of heirarchy, on how I approach leadership, and how I believe organisations should run their career development and leadership development programs. I could keep going on, but I'll stop by directing you to all of the little other things I keep posting about.Ha, ha! This is where I pop out an answer and people's estimation of my skills goes way down! Well, I use good old Powerpoint for most of my graphics. This however is the stuff I have least information about on my blog. You may find some tips in my blog posts about visual design, but I must confess you'll find far greater inspiration on Tom Kulhmann's posts on visual and graphic design.Oh I have tons of inspiration to share with you. Let me first direct you the 6 talks you should absolutely watch if you're a presenter or a trainer. I'm going to add Ken Robinson's latest TED talk to that list. Speaking of TED, it's a great place to learn not just about the various interesting developments across the world, it's also a great place to get inspiration for your own presentation style. Even Bill Gates seems a transformed speaker on TED. But if you're looking for the mother of all inspiring talks, you've got to watch the last lecture by Randy Pausch - and here's my commentary on Dr. Pausch's talk.In addition to this, there's all the inspiration I get from the web. Here are some news bundles I've created which you may find useful: Blogs from the Agile CommunityBlogs about Enterprise 2.0Blogs about Elearning and Learning TechnologyYou can also browse through my Delicious bookmarks and look at the bookmarks from my network. And of course, I have the knack of sharing inspiratin through my blog and through Twitter, so do check out the links below:The RSS feed for this blogMy twitter handle - @sumeet_moghe Well that's the map for this blog which I wanted to share with you. I hope it gives you and easy way to contextualise useful information from this website. So, how did you find the last two blogposts? I defnitely want to hear from you about this post, so please, please tweet this post if you can and also leave your comments here. Thanks!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Over the last few days I pretty am sure folks may have noticed how things have been a little bit quiet over here in my blog, to the point where some of you may have wondered whether I am ready to go ahead and ditch it and instead point people to my Google Plus Profile, like some rather prominent and prolific bloggers have been doing as of late. The truth is that I am ready to make plenty of blunt moves on redefining my social networking presence out there on the Social Web, and I will be sharing some further insights on that regard very soon, but one thing for sure is that at this point in time my blog will remain where it is. I am not planning on muting for good my personal voice, my-self, my own thoughts out there on the Web just yet. However, in the last couple of days, I have been playing, experimenting and learning quite a bit more about Google Plus itself and how it will be redefining the way I interact on the Social Web. Yes, to me, so far, Plus is a keeper! And at this point I guess I am now ready to write another blog post, the fourth of the series, on the topic of one of its most disruptive and fundamentally paramount features: Circles. Circles, on its own, makes it totally worth it working with Google Plus. I would probably even venture to state that perhaps it will be one of the most critical key capabilities that this new social networking site would have to offer to the whole Social Web. Yes, it’s that good! It’s an opportunity to help you decide and define how you would want to work and interact with your various social networks in a single space, without going crazy, or without having to create multiple identities. Or without having the system dictate how you can do it with very little interaction from your part. David Armano has put together an excellent blog post that describes, pretty nicely, the kind of impact that Circles will have with how we manage and participate further within our social networks. Worth while a read, for sure. Ross Mayfield also put together a rather interesting and enlightening blog entry on this very same subject of Plus’ Circles along with a rather nifty, eye-opening and educational deck under the heading "Visual Guide to Circles in Google+", which I have embedded below, so you can flip through the Slideshare slides quickly to get an idea of what they are and how they work: Visual Guide to Circles in Google+ by @ross View more presentations from Ross Mayfield To add further up, my good friends Dave Pollard, Alan Lepofsky and Stuart Henshall, amongst several others, have put together a couple of rather interesting and equally revealing posts, respectively, that describe for themselves what the actual main benefits are from using Circles in G+. And along with some other interesting reads made available out there in the last few days I guess we are in pretty good shape to understand how they work. But if I would have to pick up another article that would be rather instrumental in helping describe what Circles are and how they operate, I would probably have to point you folks to one of my favourite KM bloggers out there, my good friend, John Tropea, who a few days back put together "Facebook and Twitter are broadcast design models; Google Plus is a sharing design model". One of those essential, must-read articles that you cannot miss to perhaps get exposed to some of the most comprehensive writing available out there on this particular topic. It’s a rather long blog post, but, believe me, it will be worth every single paragraph of it. It’s just brilliantly done! Ok, so now that we are through with that introduction to try to explain Google Plus’ Circles, and its many many benefits, I thought I would spend the next few minutes sharing with you folks how I have actually set up mine initially, so that you could have a glimpse of how they are actually working out for me. The interesting thing is that, to begin with, I didn’t start them from scratch. I actually copied the same model I have been cultivating and nurturing with my Twitter Lists for over the last few months. Thus the first thing I did was to delete the already existing default ones and start mimicking the model I have for Twitter, which is, finally, working out just fine, after several failed attempts to look for a model that would work the way I wanted. So what I am about to describe next is basically my own model for social networking out there for two of my favourite social networking tools which I have developed over the course of the years after experimenting and playing with multiple options. The good thing though is that in G+ it’s been much much easier to implement, because of the already existing work done with my Twitter timelines. So I just had to reproduce it and move along with it. And the way I got things going was with the initial creation of three magic circles (Or Twitter Lists). The ones where I spend most of my time at the moment out there on the Social Web and which, I am sure, as soon as you read about them you would be reminded of the Dunbar’s Number, although you will see how I have gone beyond that initial 150 limit, because for each of those three circles I haven’t established a maximum number of folks. I have let it develop and grow itself and see how further it would go. But let’s see it more in detail: One50: This is the first Circle I have created and in it I have grouped those folks who I have been following for years, way before social networks became mainstream, interacting and learning quite a bit from all of them over the course of time. They are my mentors, the ones who have got my highest level of social trust, although most of them don’t know it. They are the ones who have made and shaped what @elsua is today. They are the ones that I would want to follow and continue to learn from even when I am no longer participating actively on the Social Web. My essential core network that would transcend the world of the Web. The ones that I would want to keep in touch with on a regular basis no matter what. My closest friends and daily source of inspiration, if you would want to put it that way.  Interesting enough, from my One50 Twitter List, this is the group with the lowest number of folks who have moved over to Google Plus, and still, on its own, the main reason why I will keep making use of Twitter. At least, for now. Two50: This is the second Circle that I have created, and following a similar model to the one described above, it’s the one that I have used to group all of those folks who have similar roles, interests and affinities to the ones I have, folks who are interested in Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Learning, Communities, Social Computing, the Social Web, etc. etc. The group from which I learn plenty of new tricks and further insights every day on everything social, where a good number of conversations take place on the stuff we are all truly passionate about, i.e. helping accelerate the adoption of these social tools, both inside and outside of the firewall. These are like my pals, my partners in crime, the ones I trust to brainstorm, with whom I share across plenty of ideas, learn, collaborate and share my knowledge with without asking for anything in return. It’s based on a mutually rewarding and nurturing relationship of helping each other grow further in our collective sense of the network. The power of the network.  From this group, and like I was expecting it, almost all of them are in Google Plus already. It’s actually one of my largest Circles at the moment, so, since I treasure the conversations I have with them quite a bit, I have moved that Twitter List into a Circle knowing that unfollowing them in Twitter will not cause any damage, because we already know where we can find each other. Or, at least, I am hoping we know where we can find each other… hehe TheRest: This is the third Circle I have created and, probably the best way I can think of to describe the group of folks who are part of it is by mentioning that this is my group of acquaintances. Folks I am interested in keeping up with after an initial first contact, good conversation, knowledge sharing experience, etc. etc. knowing that at some point they will move up to Two50 or, even, One50. This is the most diverse group of them all, because it includes folks from a wide range of the interests I have in multiple topics, not just some of the ones I mentioned above. I probably don’t get to interact with them as often as with the other two Circles, but, at least, I make an effort to check, once a day, what they are up to, to keep up with those loose connections, hoping to strengthen them over time.  From my Twitter List, once again, the vast majority of them are already in Google Plus, so, just like I did with Two50, we have moved the conversations into Plus and I went ahead and unfollowed them on Twitter to help avoid cross posting of repetitive timelines and become a bit more focused on the conversations themselves, rather that the broadcasting nature of Twitter itself, which is eventually what Twitter will be turning into for me over time. And that’s it! Those are my core Circles in Google Plus. But also in my Twitter Lists. What I have done though is a natural split of considering Twitter a broadcasting, messaging, notification system, whereas Google Plus will be the place where I plan to curate top-notch, best of breed content along with the conversations that may surface over time. So, yes, not planning on abandoning Twitter just yet, but certainly starting to redefine my new relationship with it, including a reduction in the amount of time I spend there on a daily basis. It’s no longer going to be my main method of engagement and participation on the Social Web. At least, for me. Just another broadcast mechanism. The one that has gotten that #1 spot on my daily social interactions is now Google Plus and will stay like that, for a while, judging from the depth and engagement of the conversations I have been having so far within each of those circles. But, as a side note, I guess I should also probably mention on this blog post, to wrap it up, how these Circles are not the only ones I have. I have got a bunch of others that I have created as well from Twitter Lists, but that they have a very specific context that I am sure would become self-evident as soon as I share their names with a one liner annotation: Customers: Indeed, got a specific circle with the good number of customers I have already been interacting with on Twitter over the years, and which I have invited to come along and hang out with in Google Plus. Most of them are already in there and the experience has been rather pleasant; even more when we haven’t exchanged a single email but kept it all happening out there on the Social Web! IBMers: Of course, I put together this circle to group my fellow IBM colleagues AND alumni, who have been flocking like crazy to Google Plus, since the experience is pretty similar to what IBM Connections has been doing for us for years. And that way they have managed to make obsolete my split personality in Twitter with my @elsua_b account, so that account is just about to hit the floor and go into a dormant status very soon. BlueIQ Ambassadors: This is the group of IBMers I work with on a daily basis helping accelerate the adoption rate of social software, both inside and outside of the firewall. They are all social software evangelists and a very enthusiastic bunch of folks who truly live social and who so far have been rather instrumental in helping IBM become a social business. Still with plenty of work to do, for sure, but their help has been tremendous over time, and it’s always quite a treat to keep in touch with them and learn from their experiences, shared knowledge, stories, connections, how-how, etc. etc. Thus if you are a BlueIQ Ambassador and you are reading this and we haven’t connected yet in Google Plus, reach out to me, please! I would love to have you in this Circle And, finally, Weak Ties: Yes, indeed, this is the last circle I have put together (Coming along from my Twitter Lists) and, as you can imagine, this is the list of folks who have added me into their circles and whom I am trying to figure out whether they would be able to make it further along on my other Circles, whether One50, Two50 or TheRest (Or any of the others for that matter!). They are the ones I check out every so often to see what they are doing, see who they converse with, who we share potentially common connections with, and who provide me with an opportunity to figure out whether we will be working together in the near future or not. This is where facilitated serendipity happens at its best, because time and time again I have been having numerous occasions where what may have appeared as a weak tie, it’s essentially a strong one when you dive through their core networks. Small worlds, indeed! Well, I guess that this long blog post will close down, for now, the series of blog entries about my first impressions on my use of Google Plus, where the initial reaction is "It’s a keeper!", "It’s both the aspirin and the vitamin I have been waiting for all along" and I am hoping it would be for most folks as well! From here onwards I will probably keep blogging about related topics to G+, but, more interestingly, about the inspiring and engaging conversations that are starting taking place over there, right as we speak! So if you would want to reach out and connect with me on Google Plus, here’s my Profile. Let’s connect! The waters are lovely … Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Today was a great day at ThoughtWorks University. Our graduates have reached the business end of the course and are building a real-world application as part of their work here. To help people build their presentation skills and also for them to share knowledge and insights, we've organised Pecha-Kucha nights in the office. The idea is pretty simple: Every week, six students and a few trainers present.People can present on any topic of their choice as long as it's valuable to the group.Their talks should have no more than 20 slides which automatically transition within 20 seconds each.Everyone in the group has to present at least once.We do this once a week, on Wednesdays and we bring pizzas into the office (or an alternate snack).So that's the general format, and we did our first Pecha-Kucha night today. And was it awesome or what! For one, I consider myself to be a good enough presenter - but was I humbled by my students! I can speak to the quality of the presentations out there and some of them were so good that I feel honoured to be in the company of such people. More than the content of the presentations, I really felt that the talks gave us a different level of acquaintance with each other which will shape our ties over the weeks, months and years to come. We had topics ranging from how to play Euchre to the coolness of mathematics; from why dogs are man's best friend to someone's first experience with programming (a complex social system). We had advice on sports, careers and blogging and there were some great questions as well.  To blow my own trumpet, I'll say our first Pecha-Kucha night was a great success, given how much we achieved in less than 90 minutes (pizza eating and socialising included). If you'd like to see the presentations, you can find them under the twupk tag on slideshare. For your benefit, I've also added the presentations to this blogpost, so you can see some of them from here. Of course, nothing can beat the experience of watching people speak live; so you've got to pardon us if the slides don't make sense by themselves. Before I leave you to view all the nice presentation-ware, I'd like to encourage you to try an activity such as this on your training program and see what people do. As trainers if we can relinquish some control and give that back to our students; more importantly treat them as peers, they're likely to amaze and astound us. That's what our students did to us today. So try it out - give up some control and be prepared to be amazed. Molly Bartlett Chris Reade My First Program - by Chris Reade Rose Fan blogging and you - a love story Andrew Clarke Mathematics and You - Andrew Clarke Ragavan Govindraj Why we do what we do Sanjiv Suman Sports - Sanjiv Suman Sumeet Moghe Career Advice Pecha Kucha for TWU Grads © Sumeet Moghe, 2009

And while I am still digging the Google Plus experience, confirming that, for now, it’s going to stick around with me for a while, time and time again it keeps proving its great value, beyond the initial learning curve and that set of discussions and interactions about getting around the tool itself. On a rather regular basis one keeps bumping into not only some rather interesting and engaging dialogue amongst your social network(s), but also precious little gems that are worth while sharing across beyond G+. Like, for instance, a recent Plus entry that my good friend, Dan Pontefract, Director of Learning and Collaboration at TELUS, shared across where he included a link to a recent video clip, where he was interviewed to talk about their experiences with social software tools within the enterprise. In case you haven’t seen it just yet, let me encourage you all and have a look into Social Learning at TELUS. It’s a rather short interview, that lasts for a little bit over two and a half minutes, but at the same time rather telling and quite revealing. In it, Dan shares how they keep making use of social tools like blogs, wikis, microblogging, etc. etc. in order to help people not only collaborate more efficiently and effectively, but also as a key, core learning activity, that helps sparks new ideas, new methods of solving business problems, while still keeping it all rather engaging and informal. In fact, while going through the video clip myself, I noticed three different things that I thought were worth while mentioning as well, which were coming out of the interview itself in a rather succinct manner, but that I think is equally important. To name: Social Software as a powerful Collaboration AND Learning environment: Yes, indeed, quite refreshing to see how the folks at TELUS have combined both social computing with learning and made them both take a big share of how work gets done within the corporate environment. It’s interesting to notice how heavy they rely on these social tools to help promote self-/group learning activities, to the point where they may well be self-sufficient, both producing and consuming that content they create and share across. Power to the people, if you ask me, and perhaps nothing more empowering than letting your employees take good care of their own learning activities, while on the job. They probably know better about their needs than you do. You don’t have to have everyone on board to get value: Indeed, something that we have seen ourselves, over at IBM as well with some of our social software tools, like IBM Connections Bookmarks where about 35k fellow IBMers make use of it, yet the entire IBM population of 400k benefit from it, because the search results from our corporate Intranet search engine are injected with those social bookmarks that folks keep adding along. And it looks like the folks at TELUS share a similar experience; while they may not have achieved just yet 100% penetration with their social tools, the ones who are making active use of them are helping everyone else get enough value, perhaps not just producing valuable content, but digesting it as well. This is, in my opinion, a critical point regarding the adoption of social tools within the enterprise, mainly from the perspective of setting up the right expectations and encouraging those who would want to make use of the tools to use them, while allowing the remaining ones adjust accordingly and figure out by themselves whether they would need to jump in as well or not. Let them figure out the value they would want to get from it is probably as good as it gets in order to allow for knowledge workers to understand how, when, why and what to contribute, whenever they may be ready. Don’t mandate, but empower: Which brings me to the third point Dan shared across that perhaps folks may not have noticed, because of how subtlety he shared it across, but that I think it’s quite important and paramount to understand what a successful adoption by most employees of these social tools would be like: don’t mandate their use, but empower your knowledge workforce to make the right decision(s) on whether they need to or don’t need to. He basically shared how at TELUS they don’t mandate folks to make use of social tools from top down, instead they allow their knowledge workers themselves to figure out whether they have a need to use them, or whether the pain points they may have could be solved by those social tools, but it’s all part of that play and experiment nature, where employees are allowed to explore by themselves and figure out the potential of social software to help them improve both their individual and group productivity. It’s all a matter of understanding that rather than managing it as a project and making it mandatory, it will always be much more productive leading the change, facilitating it, embracing it fully starting with yourself, regardless of where you may well be within the organisation, helping others how they could benefit themselves from making use of social networking. Management, all of a sudden, needs to turn into Leadership, an active leadership, by the way, that leads by example and not just by talking away about it. There are plenty of other golden nuggets that I could mention on this blog post about Dan’s short interview, but I think, instead, I am going to encourage you all to have a look into the video clip yourselves, and watch through it. It will be worth while your time, I can surely guarantee you that. And from here, perhaps just share a special Thanks! to Dan for the inspiration and for sharing along the interview itself with all of us, on what it is like a successful adoption of social software within the enterprise. In this case, at TELUS. Well done!