The focus of the event was e-learning and learning technologies. I’ve had a couple of people ask for a copy of my notes, who were unable to attend, or who saw my tweets and wanted to know more and so I’ve (finally, sorry!) typed up my notes here.

All of the talks were excellent;  there were a few key topics I was listening out for and I’ve paraphrased the bits from those talks I especially took away and added some of my notes to them.

NB: Quotes are in “double quotes” my notes are in italics.

Matthew Poyiadgi, CompTIA @mattpoy

Social Media is just a fancy way to describe the zillions of conversations that are happening online.
I hate giving things a badge like “social media” it’s evolution to me, not some new mythical beast that no-one understands.

Successful models usually give content away for free, with only 5 or 10% paying users funding the service. How could this work for you?

Example: Monty Python gave away good quality, well edited short clips on youtube to replace all the fan clips that were often in bad quality… and increased their video sales by 23,000% that year.

“There is currently 6.6 billion people on the planet sending 6.7 billion texts a day.“
The short message format is king and it’s here to stay… I’ve always argued it’s a trend, not a fad.

“If we build the people, they’ll build the business.”
B. Wise, Tupperware in 1953

A frequently quoted barrier to training is:

“What if we train people and they leave?” → “What if you don’t and they stay?”

Quote of the day! I live-blogged a few bits and this quote had by far the most RT’s.

Mike Pilbeam – VP Sales and Technical Operations at Cisco.

Cisco have fully embraced social networking within their company. Their business is driven by web traffic, they extol the value of social networking to their clients so it is logical for them to fully embrace social networking within their business.

The approach is to try everything, always say yes. Then allow the people to act as filters through ranking.  Around 30% of ideas tried, didn’t work.

So how do you create a balance of new approaches and technology with skills and experience?

How closed loop mentoring benefits all:

Gen X – content is you
Gen Y – content is separate to the individual

Gen X – if you can’t hand off, you can’t take more on
Gen Y – Shares naturally

There is a lot that both sides can learn from each other about their approaches to learning.

Cisco loves bandwidth, so they largely replaced email with video within their organisation for internal learning – they found they saved time as people presented short videos, which were easier to understand. The scheme was so successful they now use it with some of their suppliers too*.

“Enablement is all about collaboration”

It is equal parts :

• people
• content
• community

“Enable people to be lazy, make it easy to find, consume and publish”

Developing new training:

Philosophy:

• Every possible answer exists somewhere in the company, in an email, someone’s head or in a piece of content – the challenge is there are multiple answers, some good, some bad.
• “If it works, polish it… if it doesn’t bin it”
• Good ideas/guides/content will be formalised into training, bad/poor content is deleted.

Findings:

• People liked gaining stars for their content so they wrote good content.
• Demand for self-branded and customised learning/learner interfaces grew as adoption grew.
• Key to success becomes content + lenses and not your imposed filter.
• Learning and development culture has to be informal.

Systematic re-use of content is encouraged – designs, technology, information and content. Where possible all content is recycled.

Flip video cameras are used for team updates, short, quick to produce video content replaces longer emails.

Problem:

• Resistance to using new technologies

Solutions:

• Find thought leaders, the people whom others turn to to find answers and use subject matter experts as moderators.
• Able to interact with the forum via email, subscribe to topics and reply. Through time, those who used it via email moved to using the forum directly.

*It’s also interesting to see some details of Quad start to appear, if you haven’t seen this yet it’s worth a look. From first glance it’s a real-time LinkedIn with Video.

And a Springer’s final thought” from the round table discussion:

Why does eLearning have a higher take up in the US?

Culturally in the US training is paid for by the individual and self directed, take up of e-learning is 4x higher… when the downturn hit, e-learning usage on Sundays rocketed… co-incidence?

Hope this is useful, if you’d like me to clarify anything please leave a comment.

Thanks to Kelly at Element K for organising a great forum, I look forward to the next one.

Big thank you to C4L and Fibreband our main sponsors of BarCamp Bournemouth 2.

If you haven’t signed up to come along… why not?

** Sign up for BarCampBournemouth2 here **

It used to be that the status updates on LinkedIN were actually quite useful, to see what people were up to, get a snapshot of what they are/were working on… but alas no more.

Given the option to link a twitter account to LinkedIN (good) most people have chosen to send ALL tweets to LinkedIN (bad) rather than use the selective “#in” option which only sends selected tweets to LinkedIN (good).

The result?

The status updates are all RT’s (the twitter version of forwards) and off topic, no where near as useful as it used to be.

To me, it devalues the activity stream quite a bit – which is kind of a pity as the other things on there are still great – Q+A, groups, events…

Have you noticed this too, or is it just my network of people?

Please, if you link twitter and Facebook together use the selective updates function – make sure your messages are “fit for purpose”, does everything you tweet, really need to be on LinkedIN?

Select “edit my profile”, then click on the “edit” link next to your twitter username and select the option highlighted below.

Next time you want to send something to LinkedIn just include “#in” in your message.

Thanking you in advance… Luke.

———

Luke Williams on LinkedIN – I run 1/2 day LinkedIN courses in London and Bournemouth if you’d like to make more of this great business platform.

Magus members “share their challenges, opportunities and issues with a group facilitator arranging the agenda and chairing the meeting.” – I’m especially excited about some of the future plans for Magus, that are more focussed on the startup side of things to be announced in the near future.

Although it is called the “E-business group” it is not aimed exclusively at those who sell on-line, but at those businesses where the significant customer relationship is on-line.

I’d like to invite anyone interested to attend the open evening on the 28th October at 630pm (for more details see here), please drop Magus (or me) a line if you would like to come along.

The slight problem –> Magus meetings are scheduled for the 3rd Wednesday of the month, almost exactly where we’d planned to move startup-meetup to – I’d like to propose the 2nd Wed of the month (11th November) 5-7pm – venue ideas anyone?

I have been working on a new seminar for people who want to take the first tentative steps to being their own boss and run their own small or micro business, but are worried about the risks and uncertainty involved.

I’ve certainly faced these worries myself and have found, through experience, discussion and education in the MBA programme, that there are concrete, actionable steps you can take to reduce those risks and clarify much of that uncertainty.

That’s why I have created a 2-hour seminar, aimed at giving people the confidence to take that first step. And where does that journey begin? With the idea, of course!

This low-cost, high-value seminar, Shape Your Idea: How to Find a Business Idea and Tell if it’s a Good One, will give attendees the tools and knowledge to be able to find ideas, assess and refine those ideas, value those ideas and start planning the execution of those ideas.

So if you find yourself in those uncertain shoes, you can find out more here, or register a place now. You never know, it might change your life!