James Clay had an excellent Pecha Kucha presentation recently talking about Twenty Web 2.0 Apps for Learning. If you have not already experienced Pecha Kucha, it was developed a few years ago in Tokyo and means “Chit Chat.” Essentially you give 20 slides in 20 seconds–think of it as a high speed journey on a topic. The presentation above uses it for giving a glossary of social media terms you may not be aware of.
I took the liberty of defining all the terms below. Let me know if you are using this in your presentations and what your experience has been.

• Flickr Image and video sharing website.
• Twitter A microblogging service where users communicate in short messages called “tweets” that are limited to 140 characters. As of September, 2009, Twitter raised an additional $50,000 from investors, and is valued at $1 Billion.
• Etherpad A free online live collaboration site that enables simultaneous writing.
• Screenr Instant screencasts for Twitter.
• Posterous Allows for posting video, music, photo galleries, and documents to Twitter.
• Audioboo An audio blogging application that is available free of charge.
• Evernote An application that lets you create notes, snap photos, and record voice memos that can be accessed at any time.
• Shozu A mobile social media platform enabling fast, easy, two-way exchange of photos, videos and other multimedia content.
• Google Apps Access to all of Google’s suite of tools.
• Ustream Live video streaming.
• Prezi Allows for creating zooming presentations offline.
• Slideshare Sharing application for presentations.
• Ning An online service to create, customize, and share a social network.
• Delicious Popular social bookmarking site.
• WordPress A website providing an online service where users create and customize their own blogs, free of charge.
• QikA mobile utility that enables anyone to share live video from their mobile phones.
• Friendfeed Social media feed aggregator. Friendfeed allows users to aggregate services such as Twitter, Flickr, and personal blog posts on one platform. Users subscribe to each other’s feeds and comment on posted content.
• Remember the Milk Online to do list and task management.
• YouTube Video sharing website where users upload, view and share video clips. Content ranges from movie clips, TV clips, and user-generated content.

Three forward looking trends discussed by the group include the following:

1.) Learning will continue to be ubiquitous and mobile technologies will become a dominant delivery mode.

In the UK, there are now more mobile phones than people. For every 100 Britons there are 116.6 mobile phones. According to the GSM—Global System For Mobile Communications Association we will reach 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions by the end of 2008 and close to 20 billion by 2020. Think about this: how many of your colleagues do you see carrying two devices—one for work and one for fun. At our meeting, the Merrill Lynch team shared their successful implementation of MoBull: Go Learn, their mobile learning targeted to bankers on-the-go.

2.) Learning will be embedded into our everyday lives and will be boundaryless.

Knowledge management will give way to developing a social media strategy for sharing information and tacit knowledge. Venkatesh Rao on Enterprise 2.0 blog writes a great article on this subject. The bottom line of Rao’s thesis is one to consider as we think about re-imagining our learning departments. Rao believes that Knowledge Management is a dated concept conceived by Boomers (those born 1946 – 1962) just as they were moving into leadership positions. Social Media, on the other hand, is a Millenial/Gen Y (born after 1981) movement and because of the efficiencies inherent to it, will dominate how we share knowledge and best practices as we move into the future.

3.) Learning professionals—from chief learning officers to heads of talent management must focus first on being strategy driven, rather than customer driven.

We had a lively discussion at the Learning Innovation Network focused on how we are moving from being customer focused to being strategy focused. This is becoming an important distinction as learning professionals move toward delivering learning closely aligned to the strategies and business priorities of the organization and beyond “responding to individual customer needs. ” The goal in this is to transform learning into a strategic function which contributes significant business impact through the acquisition, development and retention of top talent.

Interested in learning more about the Learning Innovation Network? Send me an email at Jeanne@newlearningplaybook.com

[tags]Chief Learning Officer, Talent Management, Enterprise 2.0, Mobile Learning, Knowledge Management[/tags]

According to the BLS, more older workers are staying in their jobs longer or returning after retiring. And as a result, among workers who are 65 and older, 56 percent work full time compared to 44% 13 years ago. So much for the “brain drain” we all feared only a few years ago. See the chart above for more details on this.

With the current economic turmoil, and the vaporization of retirement savings, people will be in the workplace longer and we will have all four generations working together side by side. What does that do to the workplace? What does that do to the demands placed on the learning organization and the talent management organization?

These developments are particularly timely as New Learning Playbook is conducting a groundbreaking survey that examines the workplace of the future and the demands the four generations—Seniors, Baby Boomers, Generation X and the Millennial Generation–will place on employers. You are invited to participate in a global survey of workers from around the world. This survey only takes 10 minutes and you can have a voice into what this means as companies grapple with how to deal with four generations @ work. I am also conducting personal interviews on this topic and will share all results with our readers.

Please click here to participate in the survey.

I will be examining these results in terms of what they mean for recruiting, developing and motivating four generations of employees, as well as how to create a working environment conducive to all generations. In the meantime, if you have a personal story you want to share about how your organization is dealing with this issue, I would really like to hear from you. Send me an email.

[tags]four generations, brain drain, millennials, baby boomers, seniors, generation x[/tags]

Well, the CEO as a Blogger talked about how forward thinking CEO’s are blogging and the role HR and Learning senior executives must have to ensure the CEO as a Blogger is a success. Details are described in the post.

So when I watched NBC nightly news interview with Bill Marriott, the CEO of Marriott International, I was very interested as he described his process for blogging and then I was really amazed when he shared that his blog called Marriott on the Move has been responsible for over $4 million in incremental bookings to a Marriott property since the inception of Bill’s blog in January, 2007. There are now 60 CEO’s among the Fortune 500 who are blogging. Is your CEO one of those? IF not should he/she be?

The NBC story featured 2 CEO blogs, Marriott and Coca-Cola’s, as examples of how CEO’s are establishing these blogs to communicate openly and honestly with customers and key stakeholders.

But the story gets better because in the case of Bill Marriott, it turns out he either writes his blog posts in long hand, or dictates them and they are then transcribed and entered onto the blog. In Bill’s own blog he shares in detail how he partners with his communications specialist to create the blog which is posted on an Awareness platform and how he reads customer comments and stays in touch…

But here is a question for our Human Resources and Learning readers: If your CEO is blogging, are you involved in this along with your Head of communications? I see the lines blurring between enterprise learning initiatives and corporate communications initiatives, and all too often the HR and Learning executives are not being proactive enough to partner with other internal stakeholders. It should not be just the Head of Corporate Communications identifying and helping to launch new initiatives like the CEO as Chief Blogger. By being involved in these type of initiatives, you can:

1. learn first hand what your CEO is thinking
2. learn about what your customers want more of in terms of new products and services
3. be associated with a leading edge initiative that in the case of Marriott, has led to adding $4 million in new bookings.

Share your first hand experiences here for many to learn from…

[tags]CEO as Blogger, CLO, Marriott, Awareness[/tags]

This is a “Zero billion dollar market today” Director of Product Management Matthew Glotzbach said in a briefing about the product. But we will change this and Google Video For Business will be easy to use.

These videos will basically have the same features and limitations as YouTube, including upload size and file type limits. Videos have access control, even if they are embedded outside of the intranet or Google Apps, and can be tagged and commented on just like YouTube. As the video below states, these videos are quick and easy to create and can be uploaded and shared in a number of ways: for training, to communicate end of quarter results, to showcase famous people who visit Google headquarters like Obama and Bloomberg and finally just for some laughs and fun during a stressful overworked the day.

So, what do you think as head of training or Human Resources at your firm? How will you use this? Will this replace your in-house video production crew? Will you use video more in video sharing sites to describe a new service or for quick updates?

[tags]Google, Human Resources, Video Sharing, HR[/tags]