Expand Your Surface Area

In this month's Nuts & Bolts column I extend an invitation to  expand your surface area beyond usual topics and readings and communities:
 
" A while back at an eLearning Guild event (DevLearn 2010), I was fortunate to attend a keynote by John Seely Brown, who at the time had just published his Power of Pull. Among my takeaways? His advice to “expand your surface area.” One great way to do this is to increase your nonfiction reading, or join in conversations, in areas perhaps not directly connected to your immediate work interests."

Take a look! 

Figure It Out

No time or money to do what you'd like? Not "allowed" to use this tool or that process? Shifting time constraints? This month's Nuts & Bolts column explores figuring things out, making things happen, and getting things done. Largely inspired by Euan Semple who said: “Quit reading case study porn and get on with it.”

"Social Media for Learning" meets "Show Your Work": The 21 Day Drawing Challenge

There's a fun social learning activity going on via Lynda.com., the "21 Day Drawing Challenge" . Led by artist Von Glitschka, the project offers a daily new assignment (like "draw a cat" or "draw a man on a unicycle using only a continuous line") along with a quick overview video and printable reference worksheet. 

Additional support and participant interaction happen via a Facebook page.  There Von Glitschka offers additional tips and sometimes directs participants to tutorials in other courses. Even better: People use the comments area on the daily Facebook posts to share pictures of their own drawings and to talk about what they found especially challenging or describe the technique they used. It's a great example of people interacting around a shared purpose, showing their work, helping each other learn.

Many people are also sharing their images via Twitter (#draw21days); @kristinrtaylor tweeted a picture and said: "My first go at @lynda #draw21days challenge. Getting over my fear of others seeing my work. Have to start somewhere!" 

So if you're interested in using social media to support instruction, and/or seeing how "show your work" really works (or if you're interested in learning to draw!) do pop by and take a look. Day 3 has just started so there's still time to catch up if you'd like to join the fun. 

Reflective Practice

. Consider investing more time in working toward improving in the future, reconcilin
We spend a lot of time in this business talking about how to do things: build it, program it, deliver it, launch it, or sell it. We don’t spend much thinking about what to do after we’ve actually done it. Consider investing more time in working toward improving in the future, reconciling your walk with your talk, and building your role as practitioner in a professional pursuit.

See the July Nuts & Bolts column for details on becoming a more reflective practitioner. 

Show Your Work!

We know that a lot of “traditional” knowledge management approaches don’t work very well. We have piles of status reports and documented standard operating procedures and what have you, and still, data says we spend a quarter of our time looking for something—or someone—with the information we really need.

Working efficiently and effectively isn’t just about capturing “information.” We need to do better, not at documenting what people do, but how they get things done. This will help our organizations, our coworkers, and others who engage in our practice. It will support your credibility and establish or strengthen your brand. And it’s how we help each other learn.

See this month's Learning Solutions Nuts & Bolts Column offers an exploration of how showing our work can help solve some of organizational life's most bedeviling problems. 

Available now! 

Managing Expectations of Social Tools

I find that many organizations have rather unrealistic expectations of what will happen when they move to employ social tools. See this month's Nuts & Bolts column for more: "Every member in an organization won’t participate equally. There will be noise. And some of that noise will end up having value, or building a bridge that will prove useful later. Just like in real life.”

Headed to Learning Solutions next week? I've got breakouts...stage presentations...a panel... and live #lrnchat! Hope to see you there. 

Building Community

A lot of my time is spent hearing about, and talking about, and reading about, and endeavoring to, building communities.  I find that people come to the conversations often too focused on the same things (mostly control, platforms, and, er, control) without much regard to desired outcomes, user experience, and dangers. See this month's Nuts and Bolts column for more.