Last Friday May 25 I had the privilege of presenting at the ElNet Workplace Congress in Sydney. I thought I’d share a synopsis of my activity-based presentation: Keeping Learning in Mind: Challenges in E-Learning Practice. The intent of the session was to get the audience to think about the dissonance they may be working in...Read More

I recently reviewed a 2010 Ted Talk by Sir Ken Robinson where he argues for change in education. He warns us against the industrialisation, systematisation and standardisation of education – how this linear, ‘one size fits all’ treatment of education stifles the organic nature of learning. Are we creating a ‘fast food’ standardisation mentality with e-learning courseware?...Read More

My EdD Supervisor is Emeitus Paul Hager, an educational philosopher who keeps it ‘real’ for me when it comes to the inter-relationship between learning and technology. I recently read a number of Paul’s papers about learning in the workplace. Paul and colleagues have described the evolution of learning theories in the context of workplace learning, and...Read More

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the inaugral LearningCafe Unconference last Thursday. I hadn’t been to an unconference before, and was looking forward to some serious debate and critical thinking about some important issues facing our practice. Unfortunately I did miss the final 2 hours of the program, and so I did not hear...Read More

When an organisation chooses to implement a Learning Management System (LMS), there are lots of new tasks and processes that need to be introduced to the training role. These include more specialised reporting, systems testing before computer hardware/software (SOE) updates, maintenance of e-learning version control, keeper of quality control, helpdesk support, classroom curriculum updates and so on. Also, some additional...Read More

A number of years ago I was impressed by the writing of Stephen Kemmis, in particular his 2004 article Five traditions in the study of practice. Kemmis was synthesising work by Jürgen Habermas (1987) Lifeworld and System. What I got from the article are the following concepts. And they make sense to me from a pragmatic...Read More

Last week I blogged about what’s required organisationally for self-service learning to become part of a deliberate learning strategy. Today I’d like to explore a little more about the role of manager. Now, from the onset Id like to say that a learning strategy should include both the promotion of learning self-service and manager as...Read More

ASTD’s December 2011 T&D Magazine features a discussion on Self-Service Learning (by Patricia A McLagan), and the role of L&D to “help learners make learning more effective, efficient, productive, innovative and fun” (pp 37). From my experience, for self-service learning to become part of a deliberate learning strategy, we need: Staff who have the skills...Read More

A question from a client in organisational learning. Earning and learning The client was interested to get my perspective on a comment that suggested classroom-based learning gave participants a sense of ‘earning’ training whereas work-based training can seem like business as usual – with little reward/recognition. These are my thoughts When we are trying to...Read More