Collaborative Thinking: You Say Learning, I Say Training

Collaborative Thinking: You Say Learning, I Say Training: "In the end, the future of e-learning is to mainstream it into the everyday environment of users (in an integrated and seemless manner) and stop treating it as something that is done separately or in parallel to one’s work activities. Mainstreaming it includes letting it be free from overly engineered courseware, overly structured content and overly intrusive scheduling – not that those tactics go away, you need such frameworks for formal certification and compliance reasons. But if you look at the move towards people learning from each other in a more social manner, and the rise of mass amateurism, then learning strategists need to start designing much more immersive environments for people to exchange know-how. From a technology perspective that takes us beyond portals, virtual workspaces, IM, presence, Web conferencing, search and content management and so on. They are important elements in regards to a platform foundation but still inadequate when it comes to socializing learning. We need to include tools that provide users with a higher degree of cooperative ownership and influence around sense-making and the the exchange of know-how where “learning” per se disppears into the background. Examples include blogs, wikis, podcasting, tag clouds, shared bookmarks, folksonomies and social networking applications. Perhaps when we get to that point, the meaning of "learning" and "training" will be synonymous."

Timely insights from my colleague Mike Gotta.