I’m very much looking forward to joining Con Sotidis for an #Ozlearn tweet chat on Tuesday 10th February at 8 pm Melbourne time, 9 am London time. Together, we’ll be discussing something that’s become increasingly important over the past few years: the L&D skills gap.

L&D, like many professions, faces dramatic changes today, changes with their roots in technological, economic and geopolitical shifts that began in around 1990. Like most professions, however, we are still largely equipped with structures, attitudes and skills sets suitable for the world as it existed before that date.

So just what is our current L&D skills gap? How short are we of the skills we need to be effective in the new, connected, global age? For an answer, I’ve looked at data from the LPI Learning Capability Map. The Capability Map is a description of the 27 skills of the L&D profession, arranged over…

The Social Age sees us connecting, sharing, working and leading in online spaces. But it’s a mistake to think that the real change is in the technology. It’s not: it’s about the sociology.

The technology deals transactionally: it can make links and traffic files. But the real change is in how large, cohesive and purposeful our communities are.

It’s important to understand this from an organisational perspective, because if we mistake technology for sociology, we will likely spend our time, effort and resources in the wrong place.

We maintain both weak and strong social ties: the people in our sphere of hearing are our weak connections. The totality of people in our networks: the people who know our name (or, maybe just our Twitter handle). Our strong social ties are those to our friends, the people whose lives we impact more meaningfully.

Social technology has done two things:…

MA research proposal

This is my current proposal for research I’m doing as part of the Master of Learning Sciences and Technology. I’ve been quite fascinated by Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) for a while now, and as a learning practitioner, I’m interested in how we leverage our PLN relationships to support improvements or innovations in our professional practice. This is what my proposed research aims to explore. This proposal will be refined, and possibly change in some parts…so it’s always good to be able to look back and see how it evolves.

Introduction

Increasing competition, globalisation, and rapid pace of change are putting organisations and individuals under pressure to continuously innovate (improve processes, products, practices) (Whelan, 2007, Baker-Doyle 2008). Knowledge is often recognised as an organisation’s greatest asset (Whelan, 2007); and in this “knowledge economy” the ability to communicate and collaborate effectively across contexts is vital to survive and…