I am hugely into what future learning is about at the moment and in that connection I have been following the discussion on
https://learningcircuits.blogspot.com
The big question for this month that they are debating is:
WORKPLACE LEARNING in 10 Years
“If you peer inside an organization in 10 years time and you look at how workplace learning is being supported by that organization, what will you see? How will the mix of push vs. pull Learning; formal vs. informal be supported by the organization? Are there training departments? What are they doing? How big are they as compared to today? What new departments will be responsible for parts of workplace learning? What will current members of training departments be doing in 10 years?
In Getting Help, I discussed some aspects of the central question being raised. I’ve got a question about a work task and would like to get feedback from someone (a person, hopefully with some level of experience and expertise on the topic). Or paraphrasing Colin in Blogging to ask for Help:
If you need input from people, where’s the best place to ask?
My larger claim is that this is one of the most important, fundamental shifts in New Work
and New Work Skills that include being able to:
* How to reach out and find expertise
* How to use social media to find answers to questions
* How to learn through conversation
However, the question overly simplifies the problem. Different situations will require different answers. There’s no “best place”. And the landscape is shifting all the time. And while I discussed a couple examples this recently in LinkedIn for Finding Expertise and Searching for Expertise – LinkedIn Answers, my belief is that it is really hard right now to know enough about enough places to make good choices about:
* Where to go in what cases?
* What works and doesn’t work?
* How do you effectively work within a given context?
* What do you need to have done to effectively get help ahead of time?
* Are there places you can go if you are relatively new and needing to ask questions?”
Interesting and inspiring stuff very much related to the job we are doing now.
Here is a snippet from one comment that struck me:
“Maybe in the future learning organizations won’t be the “givers of knowledge”, maybe we become more like librarians that help people find resources (and learn to do their own searches) as they are needed.”
But hey that is not the future – that is what we are already doing with severeal of our customers…