Working/Learning Blog Carnival – April 2008

Dave Ferguson kicked off the first Working/Learning blog carnival (a collection of posts around one topic) on his blog. Blog carnivals are a kind of anthology-on-the-fly, a collection of posts from several blogs. For each issue of a carnival, participants post on their own blogs, and a host posts links to all the participating posts.The theme of the blog carnival is “Work at Learning/Learning at Work” primarily aimed at people who work in the training/learning area (that is, non-academics) e.g., how training/learning professionals go about their own learning, or how learning happens in the workplace. In the first carnival, there were contributions from Michele Martin, Cathy Moore, Harold Jarche, Janet Clarey, and Dave Ferguson.

The response to the second carnival edition has been, well overwhelming. A special thanks to all the contributors.

Here’s the second edition of the Blog Carnival:

1. Rupa Rajagoplan in her post talks about how different learners learn and provides her suggestions on what companies can do to encourage learning at work.
2. Viplav Baxi explores the challenges that we face in moving our organizations to the new 2.0 world.
3. Dave Ferguson in his post takes one of John Medina’s brain rules, “remember to repeat,” and talks about how we move information into long-term memory, how we get it out again, and what impact those things can have on how we manage learning at work.
4. Harold Jarche shares his post on Skills 2.0 for learning professionals who may want to know why it’s important to understand the Web for training and development.
5. Geetha Krishnan talks about three informal ways in which he learns at the workplace.
6. How often do you ask yourself the basic question “What Have I Learned at Work?” And if and when you do ask it, how satisfied are you with the answers? In this post, Jeff Cobb considers how we might get more out of workplace learning and issues a simple challenge.
7. Sonali Malik shares her learning sources in her post on the eCube team blog.
8. Ken Carroll in his post Constructionism works looks at learning in social networks and online communities and feel Sociology can provide insights in the way the web is creating new social structures that pertain to learning and their dynamics.
9. Clive Shepherd in his post shares we may learn to do something, whether that’s proactively, because we want to develop our knowledge and skills to meet future commitments, or reactively, because we need new knowledge and skills to carry out a current task. But a great deal of learning, probably the majority, is incidental.
10. Cathy Moore resurrects an old post where she points out that elearning is more efficient and powerful if we focus on what learners need to do, not what they need to know.
11. Michele Martin provides an interesting primer on Pecha Kucha presentation style for learning.
12. Dr. Karl Kapp talks in his post about the mistake that most people make in thinking that learning should be easy, simple and straightforward when to the contrary it hard and a continuous process.
13. Janet Clarey talks about how social learning technologies are changing the way we learn at work.
14. And my own contribution talks about leadership impact on workplace learning.
15. A last minute contribution by Cammy Bean just came in. It is something I really can related to and I couldn’t resist updating this blog even after it’s been published. She talks about how she builds learning into work — when you just don’t feel like you have the time?

The first carnival was organized via email. For the second carnival, in addition to email, I experimented with using Facebook for organizing the event hosted on the eCube Facebook group. The group is open and is my experiment to create a collaborative learning environment, a forum to Engage people by Encouraging them to Explore new Environments and Experiment with the them.

Looking forward to the next edition of the blog carnival and seeking volunteers for the next edition of carnival…