Bootsy Collins launches Funk University

Yep, the funk legend has launched an online learning programme.

Context and the 4 Cs of corporate learning

Great post over at VMG looking at the 4 Cs of corporate learning: control, content, collaboration, context.

Particularly worth noting what John Hathaway has to say about context . . . and I quote in full here:

Providing context for the learner has become the most important element in a growing majority of learning and performance initiatives. Unfortunately, it’s also the one at which learning professionals usually do the worst job. I see examples every day of companies with LMSs and portals overflowing with content and learners who have no idea where to start.

In the internal corporate training world we approach this problem by doing things like aligning content to job roles and competency models. Maybe this is a good place to start when we control those job roles and hire to those competencies, but this gets shaky in the partner world and totally breaks down when we’re talking about customers.

Taxonomies, user generated tags, ratings, reviews, personalized recommendations: all of these things help, but few of these features appear in the systems currently used to manage learning. (Or, if they appear, it’s often in a bolted-on, check-the-box kind of implementation rather than truly integrated throughout the system.)

Providing this element of context needs to be a major focus for innovation in the learning and performance improvement world. There are some early consumer-focused Web 3.0 products that are starting to point the way. I’m pretty excited by how we can take those ideas and apply them to learning.

I'm sure this chimes with many organisations - there is plenty of content, much of which has been produced at a price, which employees simply do not know is there and do not know how to access it.

We had a great example in our business. The IS team kept a list of free software available to the business - which included really useful tools - but did not publicise this fact. Once we learned of the list we put on one of our informal training sessions about the list and followed up with a post on our internal blog.

Social learning is all about the psychology of interaction

Good post here about understanding psychological drivers around content engagement. The post is directed at marketers but could be aimed at training and learning and development professionals, especially those in elearning and social learning. Why? Because it's all content and understanding how people consume and engage content is key to getting engagement with learning tools and content.

Successful elearning engagement  requires a good understanding of the convergence of neuroscience, human psychology and group dynamics as seen in Facebook, Amazon etc. Bring this into the learning environment and you will be on to a winner.

Definitions of social learning

Training Zone live features a social learning workshop with Jane Hart. Here is Jane's presentation and follow the session using the Twitter hashtag #tzljh

Social Learning: an explanation using Twitter

View more presentations from Jane Hart.

Links: social learning in the workplace

There have been some interesting posts on this topic recently (I have included one of mine BTW so I'll let you be the judge of how interesting it is) so I thought I would pull them together here. 

• If elearning is still not seen as effective how will social learning take off?
• Why go beyond e-learning? 
• How social learning also enables antisocial or asocial learning 
• Is The Key To Social Learning in The ‘Social’ not The ‘Learning’? 
• Is social learning team learning?

25 e-learning and education start-ups worth following

Interesting list of e-learning start-ups. [H/T @nyx87]

100 ways to use social learning in the classroom

Great list here.

[H/T Oldshep]