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I have been impressed by a free booklet from Reed Learning, The Little Book of the Future: a guide to collaborative learning. Use this link to request your own copy.

It’s not really free, of course, as you exchange your contact details and allow Reed to pursue you with other offers, but so far I reckon it’s been worth it. The booklet includes short articles on leading-edge digital tools for learning, along with a bit of future-gazing. Among the latter commentaries, I particularly enjoyed Debbie Carter’s vision of phones printed on wrists and video screens in contact lenses – it chimed with some of my own predictions in the final chapter of my last book, Delivering E-Learning.

I’ve been getting agitated to mention Springest, which describes itself as an independent comparison website for learning and development programmes. Originating in Holland, it offers listings for all sorts of courses, organised in subject categories, along with reviews, links to other social media, and features for learners to store their own favourites. Worth a look, I'd suggest.

OK, Martijn?

While I'm mentioning other people's products I may as well mention my own.

My new book, 101 Learning and Development Tools, is not due for publication for another three months, but it’s available to pre-order on Amazon now.

Comments, as always, welcome.

Manifesto

As we have just held elections in Scotland and the UK, it seems apposite to restate what this blog is about. I want to assert some clearer themes, and encourage readers to subscribe to follow, and followers to invite others to follow.

The key themes are my favourite issues in learning and development, including:

e-learning and blended learning
work-based learning (and volunteering-based learning)
talent management and development
corporate universities or academies
resource-based learning and learning centres
leadership and management development
knowledge management

...plus whatever else may be topical in the world of occupational learning.

Please let me know if there are other, related, themes you would like to see addressed.

Are you my friend?

Driving to work the other day, I heard an item on Radio Scotland about how many online “friends” we can realistically maintain. I’m not sure how this became a topical item for commuter news, as I have investigated further and discovered Robin Dunbar identified the number – it’s 150 – way back in 2008. (See this New Scientist link.)

The point is that those who have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook, or other social networking sites, are kidding themselves, as they simply can’t maintain sufficient contact with so many people to justify describing them as friends.

As one of the dwindling refuseniks who still haven’t joined Facebook or Twitter, I gleaned some foolish comfort from this stat, but of course I have more than 150 people in my LinkedIn network, including many of the followers of this blog, so am I one of the deluded?

I don’t think so. One of the things I like about LinkedIn is that it makes no pretence that your network of contacts are friends. Its clear purpose is networking for work-related reasons, and it holds onto that objectivity.

I’ve just invited all my LinkedIn contacts to follow this blog, as a contribution to my previously posted intention to expand this community and generate more debate. But I won’t be offended by those who don’t sign up to follow, and simply continue to read when it suits them – that’s their choice.

Follow this blog

In February, I posted about authenticity, and my posts in March have been attempts to introduce more of this. I’ve also updated my photo. Now for more personal detail.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I’ve been involved in learning and development for rather a long time – to be precise, since 1985, when I started my first job in the profession, as Training Officer of the Glasgow Council for Voluntary Service. It was there that I first designed and delivered training, first subscribed to training magazines (including ‘Training Officer’, still going strong today as Training Journal), first undertook trainer training, obtained my first professional qualification, a City & Guilds Certificate in Direct Training, and joined the Institute of Training and Development.

My ideas and opinions have evolved over a career that has seen me work as a trainer, facilitator, coach, advocate, salesperson, marketer (or should that be marketeer?), consultant, writer, manager and director. I’ve worked on the supply and demand sides of learning and development, in the public, private and voluntary sectors, in organisations varying in size from SME to PLC. My employment and consulting experience covers the industries of publishing, IT, engineering, and economic development, plus central and local government, the NHS, social enterprises and the charitable sector.

I like to think that has given me the capacity to recognise others’ points of view more readily, and to respond better to the needs of different organisational cultures. That doesn’t mean I get it right all the time, although I hope it shows a good range of reference. My main point in contributing this bit of personal history is to reveal some more of myself; they say that helps make a good blog. I’ve also found, more generally, that opening up about yourself encourages others to reciprocate, and that’s something I’m looking for more of in this blog.

I want to move away from this blog being predominantly a monologue, and try to create more of a community, where others come to contribute their ideas and opinions, and to hold debates. I’d welcome comments and responses, and I’d encourage readers to sign up as followers – if nothing else, it helps me confirm I have an audience!

To follow this blog, click on the follow button to the right >>>

Enlightenment

My Chief Executive, who is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA), recently introduced me to an impressive series of animated talks on YouTube (thanks, George!). The presentation below, by Matthew Taylor of the RSA, is a good example, and YouTube hosts many more 'RSA Animate' clips. (See also Matthew Taylor's blog.) This seems to me a particularly apposite way of promoting a 21st century enlightenment.



As a Scot, I feel duty bound to help encourage new enlightenments, given the leading role my forebears played in the previous one. For anyone who hasn't read it, I heartily recommend Arthur Herman's The Scottish Enlightenment, with its glorious subtitle (in the American edition) "how the Scots invented the modern world and everything in it". But there's no time to rest on our laurels - we have to get on with what's new. And it seems to me reinventing how we organise learning will be a key part of that - see another of the RSA Animate series, Sir Ken Robinson's talk on changing education paradigms.

As always, comments welcome.

Whither CIPD?

I think the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is a great organisation, and I’m proud to be a member of long standing. I often describe myself as having held continuous membership of CIPD and its predecessors for over 25 years – by which I mean I was a member of IPD before it won its Royal Charter, and before that the Institute of Training and Development (ITD) until it merged with the Institute of Personnel Management (IPM).

I voted for that merger. I know learning and development professionals who did not, and they argued that trainers’ interests would be lost in a body that primarily served the interests of human resources (HR) generalists. It’s a long time since that merger, but I often find myself wondering if they were right.

The latest issue of the CIPD magazine, People Management (a title that is little to do with learning) carries a diagram showing “forty years of evolution” (pp 28-29 of the print edition) where the ITD is virtually airbrushed out of history. There’s an image of the IPM journal, but none of any ITD publication.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised: the magazine’s overall strapline is “HR news, comment and jobs…” The institute is often described in shorthand as the body for HR professionals. And the recent revamp of its professional map reduced “learning and talent development” to just one-eighth of the institute’s scope.

Well, I’m not an HR professional; I’m a learning and development professional. And the latter is not simply a subset of the former. The merger was supposed to be a marriage of equals; indeed, numerically there were far more of us in ITD, and I wonder whether that remains the case. I often feel like a second class citizen in CIPD, and I’m a Chartered Fellow, who has spoken at the Scottish and UK conferences, and has written extensively for CIPD publications. If I feel a bit like that, how much more excluded must others feel?

I’ve no intention of giving up my membership. I’m also a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute, and I have no concerns that there I’m part of a much broader community. But I wonder whether CIPD genuinely serves the interests of learning and development professionals, or whether we’d be better served elsewhere?

Authenticity

This subject reminds me of the Provencal peasants in Jean de Florette, mocking the eponymous hero’s plans to concentrate his farming on “the authentic”, which they caricature as a crop grown only in books. Yet authenticity is important.

A few days ago I co-facilitated some management training, where my co-facilitator listed various different leadership styles and then offered situational leadership as a model for selecting an appropriate style. I countered with the model of authentic leadership, which until then I hadn’t seen as the antithesis of situational leadership. I think it’s possible to be too adaptable, and leave those we work with wondering what we really believe, and what really matters to us.

Much of what is written about authentic leadership is too touchy-feely for me, with its emphasis on inner spirituality, but I think the essential concept is sound. Nigel Nicholson, in the current issue of Management Today, has his tongue firmly in cheek when he says authenticity is “great if you can fake it”, but he reaches the same conclusion I do: “the essence of leadership is adding value that can only come from the identity of the leader”.

We could all bring a little more of our real selves to our work, and do a little less role playing. A bit belatedly, my New Year resolution is to try to do this.