Informal Learning “Broadening the Spectrum of Corporate Learning”

Innovation, Learning, Presentations 1 Minute

On November 8th 2010 I delivered a keynote at the second Symposium of the Dommel Valley Group in Eindhoven. The theme of the day was “Informal Learning”. My presentation touched on the “Learning DNA” of the company I work for, looked at some of our efforts in the informal learning space and brought up nine (non-exhaustive) things that I see coming up in the near future.

Please check out my slides (or download a 4.3MB PDF copy of them):

[slideshare id=5622083&doc=101107dommelvalleykeynote-101031084917-phpapp01]

The nine points led me to ask the audience nine questions:

  1. Have you shared something explicitly in the last week?
  2. Do you feel you are an expert on what makes a human brain tick and where motivation comes from?
  3. Do you have the capability/capacity to capture and deliver video?
  4. Are you creating multiple learning strategies (i.e. are you diversifying)?
  5. Do you own an Android/iOS/Windows 7 smartphone?
  6. Have you ever started with the best performers to see how something should be done?
  7. Have you been the steward of an online community of practice?
  8. Does your organisation have a meta-layer on top of its content/information?
  9. Is your first instinct to find the great learning materials that exist before you create your own?

I personally cannot answer “yes” to all of these questions, but I am committed to work towards a “yes” on all of them in the next couple of months. To how many of these questions can you answer “yes”?

Finally, this is the first time I used the the concept of Social Contextualization of Content in a presentation. I look forward to exploring the concept further in a future post.

Published by Hans de Zwart

Published

11 thoughts on “Informal Learning “Broadening the Spectrum of Corporate Learning””

  1. Het tipje van de sluier dat de presentatie oplicht maakt dat ik het jammer vindt dat ik het niet ook gehoord heb. Het zet me nu al tot nadenken. Zeer interessante materie.

  2. Hi Hans,
    What a lot of slides! Loved it, even though I wasn’t there. Interesting thoughts about informal learning and most of all the time to design activity based learning instead of presentation based. By the way do you have links to the studies you refer to on slide 43?
    See you! Ciao, Job

  3. Hi Hans,

    Thanks again for your inspiring talk on our DVG symposium. I liked to see your inspirations, and copied a few of your blog recommendations. But most impact on me and many people in the audience came from your confronting list of questions. The number no’s for me is really disturbing and set me thinking about adding a few issues on my agenda for the next few weeks.
    Gert Jan

    1. Hello Gert Jan, it was a pleasure to do the talk! Thank you very much for the invite, it has forced me to structure some of my thinking and bring a bunch of disparate thoughts together. Now I have a resource that I can actually use in my daily work to set some parts of my agenda. Congratulations on the conference and the Dommel Valley Group, both great initiatives!

  4. Hi Hans,

    Great presentation, I can imagine how you delivered it. Small but nice detail, when I got a job as ‘Information designer’in 1990, the first book I read was ‘A pattern language’ from Christopher Alexander. Nice to see it in your top 5 of the year. And with your reading speed, that really is something!

    1. I really thought it was an amazing book: in form, content and most of all conceptually. I will dig a bit more into pattern languages and how they can be used. Let’s make sure to have dinner in Berlin at the Online Educa…

  5. Professional Dominoes player – where did that come from??? ;-). Anyhow, I plan to have won the lottery and retired by then! I like the content, its amazing how much we absorb from informal channels!

  6. Pingback: 9 Questions for All Learning Professionals in 2011 « Hans de Zwart: Technology as a Solution…

Comments are closed.