Personal Learning Environments and working environments

A very interesting paper from Graham Attwell and Cristina Costa at Pontydysgu on linking personal learning and work.
I particularly liked the following quote:
there is a discontinuity between the idea of integrating personal learning and working environments and the business strategies of many companies, a discontinuity which is fuelled by present policies and [...]

personal learning environments

I’ve been reading a few interesting posts on personal learning environments (PLE) here and here (as a blog on a presentation from Stephen Downes).My experience has been that constructing a PLE has had an enormous impact on my personal professional development – but developing a PLE that works for me took a long time (years [...]

interesting [links]

A number of people have been interested in the new report from JISC – see here – on the lack of digital literacies among the digital natives/ gen y. I’m less concerned about issues of plagiarism (tho’ that’ll change now I’m an actual academic, but we have software to spot that sort of thing) but [...]

improvisation and learning

In my last post on promoting learning in projects, I stated:
Organisational processes are the rythm section that enable project teams to improvise with rigor
But this post from Chris Collinson makes expresses it all so much clearer.

Team learning, knowledge and CoPs

Following on from my previous post on team learning and another on collaboration I’m working on processes of organisational learning and the transfer of lessons learned through project activity to the wider organisation. As a project team disbands and takes it learning on to new projects there is a basic and obvious mechanism for transfer [...]

Web 2.0 in the Learning Ecosystem – link

Interesting post here from Jon Ingham on organisations’ use of web 2.0 technologies. It seems to me that the organisational focus on the efficiency gains above the transformative potential of web 2.0 points to the cultural barriers to effective implementation of enterprise 2.0 outlined here by Todd Stephens. I’d be interested to see something like [...]

Situated knowledge management

Thinking through the links between knowledge management and learning via this post from Jack Vinson, reinforces to me the importance of situated learning, ie, that powerful learning occurs when it takes places directly in the situation the learning will/ should be applied. Thus the continued focus on work-based learning, learning by doing, informal learning, sitting [...]

its a wiggly world!

A good post here on the “messy and chaotic” actual world of real organisational life. The emphasis on personal networks that work across and between the formal organisation structures – people both subvert the formal organisation while simultaneously ensuring that the organisation functions (or achieves a lot more than just functioning). The emphasis on management [...]

Company DNA

I recently came across this post from Umair Haque, a discussion leader at HarvardBusiness.org.
I’ve come across some of his posts before and kind of understood them and kind of not …. but this is for me the clearest articulation of his views on firms and the ‘new economy’ I’ve seen so far. I’ve read the [...]

Learning Cycles

Chris Collinson has an interesting post on the use and abuse of the concept of lessons Learned. Based on Kolb’s learning cycle, he posits the “ignorance spiral” where the abstract conceptualisation stage stys ust that, abstracted” with no discernable imact on future behaviours. The same mistakes and errors are made, the lessons aren’t learned.
Now it [...]