What does the phrase Don’t take this personally  bring to mind? Being fired? Not being selected for the new project team? Being assigned a task you don’t want to do? Who’s kidding whom? These things are very personal. I’ll never forget the time I had to lay off half my team. The personnel manager and I went through our routine. We put a large size box of Kleenex on the desk. People are emotional beings. We take everything personally. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, business has tried to cover this up. No messy emotions to get in the way. Logic breaks down. MORE >>

You may as well ask "What makes a good book?" when thinking about the characteristics of good elearning. It depends on what it's trying to achieve, who it's aimed at, and the context in which it will be used. Are we talking about a novel, a textbook, a reference, a coffee table book, a children's picture book, etc? Nevertheless, I'm going to try. This thought process started during the recent Midlands Learning Tweetup. During the course of the evening, many topics were covered, but one stuck in my mind. We were trying to come up with examples of good elearning. It's not easy! Desirable. Sticky. MORE >>

Over the next few weeks I'm going to provide my own commentary to the excellent Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine. The report is largely the work of Steve Rayson. In his own inimitable whirlwind fashion, he interviewed 30 or so major UK employers this summer to get a handle on the key trends in workplace learning. He did a good job and the report adds an interesting alternative perspective to the research carried out by others in the UK such as Towards Maturity. The first 'insight' from the report is that 'improving performance still matters the most'. MORE >>

As excited as I am about the Coherent Organization as a framework, it’s not done by any means. I riffed on it for a Chief Learning Officer magazine, and my Internet Time Alliance colleagues have followed up. However, I want to take it further. The original elements I put into the diagram were ad-hoc, though there were principles behind them. As a start, I wanted to go back and look at these elements and see if I could be more systematic about it. had, as Harold’s original model provided the basis for, separate groups for Work Teams, Communities of Practice, and Social Networks. MORE >>

As U.S. political speeches go, many of us will agree that George Bush was never destined to grace us with the same public speaking prowess that seemed to come so naturally to individuals like Martin Luther King Jr. and Steve Jobs. Bush once proclaimed “You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test” In this rather amusing example, I shouldn’t really need to point out that he could have perhaps chosen his words a bit more wisely. An excellent article that I was reading recently whilst on my way to work illustrates my point. Obama selected ‘Forward.’ MORE >>