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So this morning was the key note session with Jim Collins which I thought was pretty great. Before Jim spoke though we had to sit through Tony Bingham, President of ASTD. Personally I would have liked the extra time to hear more from Jim. I felt like I was sitting though an advertisement for ASTD. But shoot. I’m already a member. I know not everyone is, but cut me a break.
Jim Collins talked about the research he has been working. I want to highlight some of the points that I took away.
Jim told a story about of one of his experiences with a mentor. In summary is mentor said: “Don’t be interesting, be interested.” Wow. What powerful advice and such a great way to live. Definitely need to be more interested – although I don’t know if I’m all that interesting.
A couple of key learning points (and sorry for lack of details – check out www.jimcollins.com- he’s got a lot of free content):
1. Training and Development professionals need to turn their respective areas into pockets of greatness.
2. Learning professionals need to help their organizations develop and select Level 5 Leaders.
Marker of decline: Problematic succession of power. 1 wrong leader can bring an organization down.
3. As members of the T&D world need to help members of the organization see that one of the primary factors in growth is getting the right people. Part of this is the fact that interaction and retention are more important for growth then technology.
| Marker of decline: When the organization begins to loose key people be terrified. 4. Make great people decisions. 5. People don’t have jobs – they have responsibilities. Then develop and help other develop the ability to answer what they are responsible for. 6. Their is danger in abandoning the fly wheel. Don’t abandon the fly wheel. – basically we need to keep pushing. Even if things start going really well, we need to keep pushing. There were other good things; if I get a chance I will post more about this. Jim’s book was recently recommended to me, before I realized that Jim was a keynote speaker. If his book is a good as his talk, I’ll have to pick up a copy.Good to Great |
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I am going in for more ASTD Internationa l presentations today. Hopefully there will be some things I can take back to apply in designing training for TechSmith .
Specifically I would like to have some conversation with folks who are trying to do e-learning (or move towards more of an e-learning 2.0). I think there is a great room for screencasting, which I hope to do some soon on this blog. It definitely is not the end-all-be-all solution, but I think there is a lot of merit in begin able to show someone at their pace the info that they need.
I think in situations where someone is trying to reach a mass audience and there is not necessarily going to be a lot of two way conversation – then screencasting is a powerful tool – especially when conveying information/knowledge/learning or what ever else you call, about something on your screen.
I could see an educational YouTube – home-grown topics in training and education. Although, there would have to be a half-way reasonable way to weed out junk… It could create a whole new realm of educational discovery. Throw in social networking, ways to comment on the video (thinking something like digg )
-matt
I arrive in Atlanta today and went to ASTD International. This is my first ASTD conference – I’m excited that I have an opportunity to learn more about the field.
I’ve attended two sessions today – both looking at e-learning. The first was by Marc Rosenberg. It wasn’t exactly w.at I was looking for. Marc did a great job though. Working with TechSmith Corporation (makers of SnagIt and Camtasia Studio) I am looking more for ideas on how to take our online tutorials to the next level (See some of our stuff in our Learning Center).
The second session was more of what type of session I am hoping to attend here at ASTD. It was about e-learning 2.0 by Tony Karrer.
Tony presented on web 2.0 technologies that can be used for e-learning 2.0. Some of the technologies that he talked about were wikis, social bookmarking, blogs, RSS Reader – with a brief mention to several others (social networks, add-in/mash-ups, podcasts, videos, etc…)
A couple of take aways for me: 1 – Tony talked about the value of blogging. He mentioned that a few folks from a previous ASTD conference that took that challenge to blog found that they learned a significant amount in a year that they took that challenge. So I’m going to try it. I need to find time to consistently approach subjects and topics.
2 – Social bookmarking – I’ve dabbled. I need to be better at marking things that I find and set up an RSS feed for topics I’m trying to learn about. (Going to see if I like Bloglines better than Google Reader)
3 – Many folks at the session were unaware or not currently using these technologies. It seems to me that there is a great opportunity to better understand how they can work in a learning context, and drive some adoption. I’m wondering if at TechSmith, we couldn’t help to drive this type of usage in the way we help people to learn.
