CorpU Weekly Digest: Social Learning (2012-July-16)

Topics: Social Learning

Here are this past week's headlines in social learning: 

• (1) Critical skills for supporting social learning: Content Curation ; 
• (2) Harold Jarche's article on an important capability for effective online social learning: personal knowledge management (PKM), which is behind active sense-making ; 
• Books: Training to Imagine: Practical Improvisational Theatre Techniques to Enhance Creativity, Teamwork, Leadership, and Learning ;  
• Webinars ; 
• Conferences

 Critical skills for supporting social learning: Content Curation
Beth Kanter's recent blog posting provides a good overview and a series of links to Robin Good, who has done important work to clarify content curation. Among the links are:

• A really impressive infographic of content curation tools  
• A presentation of his content curation technique
• A comprehensive map of content curation skills, divided into key categories

Robin Good has more than 250 tools in this collection, so it's well beyond the basics — and if you have the time, he's built a pretty good list of assets to help you master the topic. Read Beth Kanter's article on Robin Good's thoughts on content curation, "The Unanticipated Benefit of Content Curation" 

 Harold Jarche's article on an important capability for effective online social learning: personal knowledge management (PKM), which is behind active sense-making.
Harold Jarche's latest post raises a critical point about the importance of personal knowledge management (PKM) as a critical component of sense-making related to online collaborative learning. Sense-making takes time, discipline, and effort. A strength of PKM is the personal, "manual" nature of sense-making activities. The act of writing a blog post, a tweet, or an annotation on a social bookmark all force you to think a bit more than clicking once and filing it to an automated system. Other sense-making routines, like review of Twitter favorites and creating Friday’s Finds, can encourage reflection and reinforce learning. As Jarche notes in this article, Sense-making, or placing information into context, is where the real personal value of PKM lies. The knowledge gained from PKM is an emergent property of all its activities. Merely tagging an article does not create knowledge. The process of seeking out information sources, making sense of them through some actions, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge are interlinked activities from which knowledge (often slowly) emerges. The difference between PKM and curation is that the former is personal, while the latter is for an intended audience. Sense-making is the most important aspect in both cases, as Jarche notes and codifies: 

• Filtering (separating signal from noise, based on some criteria)
• Validation (ensuring that information is reliable, current or supported by research)
• Synthesis (describing patterns, trends or flows in large amounts of information)
• Presentation (making information understandable through visualization or logical presentation)
• Customization (describing information in context)

Read Harold Jarche's article,"PKM as pre-curation"

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 The Business of Learning: New Major Products, Mergers, Acquisitions, and Partnerships

No major news in mergers, acquisitions, or product releases.

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 Books To Read

Creating innovative products and game-changing processes, and adapting to new cultures and communication styles, have all become imperative for business survival. Today's business leaders, no matter what the size of the organization, have discovered the value of improvisational theater techniques to develop creativity and collaboration skills they need. Since publication of its seminal first edition, the principles and techniques pioneered in Training to Imagine have been widely adopted by organizations around the world, and have given rise to the field of Applied Improvization. This new edition builds on the characteristics that made it the most comprehensive and most easy-to-apply resource for using improve in organizations. As before, this book translates the theories and exercises of improve into language that is familiar to business culture, and provides guidelines, case studies and exercises intended for use by individuals for self-development, for small groups, and for facilitation by corporate trainers. Buy Now 

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 Webinars 

HR's Technology Road Map: Creating an Integrated HR Tech Strategy
Date: Thursday, July 19, 2012, 2pm ET
Presenter: Bob Kaunert and Kim Billeter Register now

Choosing the Right Authoring Tools for eLearning Development
Presenter: CommLab India Register now

Learning Design Process
Presenter: CommLab India Register now

Gamify Your Training: Use Gamification to Increase Employee Engagement and Improve Feedback
Date: Thursday, August 2, 2012, 1pm ET
Presenter: Greg Greunke, President, Tuzooni & Greunke Register now

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 Conferences

Attracting, Developing and Retaining World-Class Talent
Date August 6-7, 2012
Location: San Francisco, CA, US Register now

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