Continuous Learning & Development

I will be collecting interesting free learning resources that I find on the web.
Main focus will be on soft skills.

New: Time Management
If time is well managed and invested it will clear the way for future growth and success.
Professor Randy Pausch gives an overview of the latest techniques around time management and shares his own experience. And he knows what he is speaking about: “According to his doctors, computer science professor Randy Pausch has three to six months to live due to cancer, and in this video lecture he shares his tips for making the most of your time, “the most precious commodity you have.”" Pausch, Randy: Lecture on Time Management, Video, 08 April 2008, Lifehacker.com

What is the best way to learn from this video ? My recommendation is to write down any idea or technique Professor Randy Pausch is talking about while watching this video. If you do not research has shown that you are very likely to keep only keep 20% of the information received through this video.

Once you have collected all ideas and techniques from this lecture go through the list and define an action to take for each item.  To put your learning into action is key in the retention of this new aquired knowledge. To take action will also support your evaluation of this new knowledge.

Another recommendation is to break actions that would require a few hours into smaller chunks that might only take you a few minutes to do. This avoids pushing the start of the action into the future and maybe never gets started.

Randy Pausch has also written a book about his Time Management Lecture.

New: Doing Business in Second Life (A Virtual World)
How people make a real living in a virtual environment ? These are one of these emerging jobs that did not exist just a couple of years ago.

1) Web 2.0 in HCM
What it will do for Human Resources HR function ?

2) My prediction for 2008 – groupware is so cool
Why 2008 will be the year of web based groupware ?

3) Personal Learning Environments
What is are personal Learning Environments and what are their benefits ?

4) All about conferencing
What conference tools are around and what are their costs, etc ?

5) Personal Learning Environment for language learning
What does a Personal Learning Environment for language learning looks like ?
Fanatastic, this is just what I was looking for. This shows the state of the art in learning, wow . It also lists a very interesting free collaborative environment for language learning called MyHappyPlanet.

6) Jobs and Careers in Social and Collaborative Learning
What are the future or emerging jobs in careers in social and collaborative learning ?

7) How to become  a professional blogger ?
This is a great post on professional development. I find this a very good description of how someone transitioned over years into professional blogging. A must read in my opinion.

The Ten Most Marketable Web Development Skills ?
What are the current marketable technical skills for a web developper ? This post was published in December 2007. For each technical skill the author listed links to relevant learning resources. Excellent!

9)e-Learning Reloaded: Top 50 Web 2.0 Tools for Info Junkies, Researchers & Students
How to collect all your notes, lists, links, etc. online for free ? How to get 1GB free storage space ? How to create free mindmaps and flowcharts collaboratively ? And many more interesting helpers….

10) How Tom Peters is using a wiki to collect real life management stories ?
Another example on how to collect collabaretively knowledge continuously for your
development.
You want to know about the management guru Tom Peters, check out his Blog.

11) 1000 True Fans
What does it take to build a sustainable living online ? Article by Kevin Kelly, founder executive editor of Wired News.
How this would translate into a winning strategy in making a living through teaching online is explored by Brian clark in his article: A 20-Step Process For Finding Your 1,000 True Fans.

I have created a wiki around developmental assignments.

In my recent post I introduced you to filters as a great way to filter out what you really need to learn.

Now I found an excellent example of a filter for language learning by Timothy Ferris in his blog post: How to learn (but not master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor).

With this Filter what he calles Deconstructing a langugae Timothy determines the likelihood of becoming fluent in a language in the next to two to twelcve month.

Timothy Ferris is the best selling author of “The 4-Hour Workweek“.

One of the best ways to learn is to teach it to others. Therefore I will be listing some free tools to use to teach virtually. This list is not complete. I will do some maintainance over the next couple of weeks as I am going to test the tools before listing them here.
It is up to you what tools you finally use to teach to others. I like to make teaching a rather engaging and action oriented process. There are a number of tools to support this:

1) Scheduling tools:
To schedule a synchronous activity such as a Webinar I like to use Doodle. This tool allows you to poll your audiences’ prefered date for a synchronous event.

2) Sensibilisation: (Pre Event or Post Event Activities)
I like to sensibilize my audience especially when I have some key slides for them.
Just the other day I polled one of my audiences after delivering an online presentation via Netmeeting with a free tool called: Kwiksurvey. During my presentation I had introduced a list of factors having an influence on successful leadership career development. In the poll I let the audience rate each factor’s influence. After a week I shared the results with them.
Another way to use the tool is to poll your audience before delivering a presentation or a training. I usually have one main question for each slide I am going to use in this kind of events. By letting the audience rate the importance of each question before I get a good glimpse on which will be the key questions and therefore the key slides for them.

During my time in university I have experienced the power of collaborative learning myself. We were about 15 students attending a class together. Our professor was one the advisors to the German Government. One thing he enjoyed most was thinking loud in front of this class. The class was officially scheduled for 90 minutes. This did not stop this famous professor to elaborate all aspects of the topic of the class during his lecture in a “dramatic” monologue while walking up and down in front of us. Needless to say that his type of lecture could last until 3 to 4 hours without break. Leaving most of us puzzled what his key message was and what to learn in respect of the final exam at the end of the semester. Not to mention that it was impossible to keep the attention level during this time in the classroom. I still wonder today how I was able to manage not to fall asleep.

Another obvious fact was that there was a large percentage of students who failed the final exam for this class.

The only way I thought about how to survive the exam was to form a study group. This seemed to be a good idea as then all the students of this class attended the study group. I remember some of them questioning at the beginning if studying together will be effective. By the end of the semester we were all fully engaged in this group and prepared the upcoming exam together. The result was better than imagined – None of us failed.

 Now I found a landmark study by Richard J. Light, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “Light discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students’ succes in higher education – more important than the details of their instructors’ teaching styles – was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. Students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own.” Seely Brown, John;Adler, Richard P.: “Minds on Fire – Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0” Page 18

Developmental Assignments 2.0 

This is one of my favorite topic in development. Seminars, books, self study are not as effective as doing it, trying it out, putting it into action. Developmental assignments are the best way to leverage your development. 

There are plenty of possibilities to choose a developmental assignment for inside or outside of your job or while you are in between jobs. This book lists quite a number of assignments: McCauley, C., Developmental Assignment, ISBN: 1-882197-91-7 

Nowadays a lot of great assignments can be found on the internet. My intention is to collect them here. In order to better group these assignments I have chosen to list them against the MBA Core Curricula’s. I think this offer as good way to identify an assignments that would develop you further in the respective area.Another way to list assignments is against global competencies. Whilst this is an interesting way to structure development assignments yet these competencies vary from company to company.I took this MBA Core Curricula’s from the book “What the best MBAs know”, Edited by Peter Navarro, McGraw Hill 2005, Page 7

I would be happy to receive any suggestions around assignments in the commentary box. Thank you very much for your support in advance.

The list will be continuously updated. 

1. The Strategic and Tactical MBA
1.1 Management Strategy
1) An Archive of successful and failed business plans. (Business Plan Archive)
2) Vote on the best business plan. Get an eye for the winning plan. Another contest where one can vote.
3) Evaluate Business Models or submit your own. Click here to go to the site Ideawicket.
4) Web 2.0: “The next step is to start a planning process with a comprehensive map of your innovation ecosystem that positions your value creation and assesses the interdependencies that will determine the flow of benefits and your ability to capture a share of them. this is not a traditional competitive landscape or value-chain analysis but an analysis of the participants creating knowledge pertinent to your existing and future buiness. While this includes business partners and competitiors, it extends to academia, public research institutes, think tanks, creative communities or communities of practice, and contract research organizations. The map needs to be global and cover all relevant disciplines that intersect with your strategy.”Tapscott,Don; Williams Anthony D.: Wikinomics, Atlantic Books, 2007, Page 277 f.

1.2 Macroeconomics
1) Manage a virtual fund on Marketocracy. More about Maretocracy in wikipedia.It has several benefits to run a fund or participate in a club. It let’s you wear an investor’s head for some time and you need to take the macroeconomical situation into account. This is an interesting assignment for future leaders who will be involved in investor relations or who are going to run a business. 

2. The MBA Toolbox
2.1. Quantative Analysis (Statistics, Decision Analysis, and Modeling) 

2.2 Managerial Economics 

3. The Functional MBA
3.1 Operations Management 
3.2 Marketing
3.2.1 Public Relations
1) Be an editor on the community Digg. More about Digg in wikipedia. An opportunity to see what news in a democratic editorial environment makes it to the top.
2) A longer term assignment is to create your own blog and attract readers to your blog. 3) Colloborative Product Development and Design. CrowdSpirit.
4) A Rapid Prototyping Platform. Create an idea and sell it. Ponoko. 

3.3 Financial Accounting 

3.4 Managerial Accounting 

3.5 Corporate Finance 

3.6 Information Technology
1) Participate in a crowdsourcing project. Cambrian House. This one is IT related. 
2) Create a mashup. Paul Rademacher (Picture) created the mashup housingmaps. This got him later a job with Google.

4. The Organizational and Leadership MBA
4.1 Organizational Behavior and Leadership
1) Build your own community. Ning is platform where you can create your own social network. More about Ning in wikipedia.
2) Online Brainstorming. Brainreactions.
3)  Participate in a crowdsourcing project where you take the lead or support the leader. 

4.2 Human Resources Management
4.2.1 Learning & Development
1) Deliver Online Training. If there are no opportunities at your current company the option is to teach via the online learning community WiZiQ. You will also need to understand the technology in order to deliver your training. It prepares you to deliver your message to virtual teams and or give virtual presentations or trainings.
2) Career Planning or Planning your Development. The first step is self assessment.Here you find links to free Self-Assessment tools. (for example Myers-Briggs Personality type test) 
3) Leadership Development: “The starting point for any mager is personal use of the new collaborative technologies, preferably in conjunction with a Net Generation youngster. Ask your college student son or daughter to show you Facebook. Join MySpace. Edit a page in Wikipedia. Create a video clip for YouTube. Get a taste for how these open communities work.” Tapscott,Don; Williams Anthony D.: Wikinomics, Atlantic Books, 2007, Page 277.

5. The Political and Regulatory MBA
5.1 Business and Government 

5.2 Corporate Ethics Still verifying:

Second Life. This online game offers interesting opportunities to develop a number of the areas. One could be marketing, but I have not yet looked at it.

I looking for to list other successful collaborative assignments/projects here:
1) www.katarinalist.net is one of my favourite examples. Tapscott,Don; Williams Anthony D.: Wikinomics, Atlantic Books, 2007, Page 185 ff.

I have already written one post about the key factors for successfull learning. Learning is a process. And to run a process at optimum yield (speed, outcome,etc.) the best is to focus on the leveraging factors that influence the process most.  In the last post I mentioned the recreation factor to be far more influencial than focusing on the action. Sleep is probably the key recreation factor before anything else. I will write about other recreational factors in another post.

Now what is second most important for the Learning Process ? I call this the learning filter. It is most effective to filter out the noise before learning anything useless. The noise is the information you do not need to learn. Also information that you could retrieve on time when needed (Example Wikipedia). Now how do I build a filter ?
To build a filter seems to be difficult task to do especially if it is a new subject you want to learn.
So how would you know this filter is not filtering out the information you need ?

Steps to build your filter:

1. Analyse

2. Determine the main questions

3. Define your learning outcomes.

4. Build an agenda or a table of content.

1. Analyse 
For every subject there is are the so called standard book, website or experts. This is one of the first steps to take.  I will write a post in more detail soon about this step.

2. Determine the main questions
For every main topic in the book or on the website create the main question that this topic is going answering.

3. Define your learning outcomes
Identify based on the main questions what is the outcome you need.
Example: Question: How to I create a pivot table in Excel 2003 ? Your intended outcome is: Create a pivot table in Excel 2003. Now to get to this outcome there are also certain steps to take – which you would identify and list in step 4.

4. Build an agenda or table of contents
This is now actually the filter. Here you list based on your questions and outcomes what resources you need to identify and collect in order to achieve your outcome. In the above example it would mean to read a certain chapter in a book for example. Also to find an example on the internet or to ask a specific question around pivot tables in a usergroup.
But before you start running first build the agenda. Going of to usergroups to ask a question before you have an overview of the subject will only confuse you as these questions are too specific and often recieve different answers depending on the person who answered understood the question.

I have always been excited about learning & development.
What always intrigued me was to find the right tools to support and enhance my learning & development.

Now what drives me is a vision.

A vision where it is easy to have access to education.

With the web 2.0 there are new opportunities to build engaging learning environments. Learning environments where people throughout this world collaboratevily learn and educate each other.

When I joined the internet there were just more than 100 000 users and no visual front end to use but somehow already a place where people learned and collaborated.

Now 17 years later we see the wonders of the so called web2.0 unfold.

My vision is to be part of this fascinating change. Helping people to be competent to use the web to learn or train others.

I want to experiment with many freely available tools around the net to build engaging learning worlds or even universities. Places that are created through collaboration and bring about new professions, new wealth, new ideas and give access to education to people who had not had the opportunity before.

If you want to join me on this journey I would happy to meet up with you and start collaborating.

This is only a start of the tools that I use for Learning Online.

1. Learning Journal
Most of the most successfull people have one thing in common and that is writing a diary. A Learning Journal is the diary which you slowly fill with your thoughts, questions and findings and goals you setting yourselve or your vision.
I have listed seven good reason for a Learning Journal Blog in this post.

2. Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking sites is a good place to collect the sources of information you encounter during your continuous learning journey.
Digg is just one example. Others that are popular but require an installation process are: StumbleUpon and Delicious.