Dr. Bhaskar Chatterjee, the chief guest at the CLO Summit India earlier this month, spoke that mistakes should be part of a learning organization’s culture. That resonated strongly with me. I have written about how we all learn more from mistakes. At Upside Learning do ask all our employees to not be afraid of making mistakes.
Yes, we believe it can.
As responses to a recent post where I listed five things not to do while selecting an LMS I received a couple of queries about using an Open Source LMS, customizing it to suit the requirements and if it is advisable to do so. There were also questions around the best approach to use an open source LMS and on how to estimate the amount of maintenance such might require on an ongoing basis. This post is for people exploring an open source LMS as an option either for a new LMS setup or for a switch-over.
More companies are looking to challenge Amazon Kindle’s hegemony in the eBook market. Sony has been in the fray for quite some time. Barnes and Noble made it clear several months ago that it too had designs on this market. Yesterday it released its dedicated eBook reader called the ‘Nook’ in New York city. The device has many features that distinguish it from the Kindle, including a color touch screen for control, and the use of the Google Android operating system.
Our HR team is getting really busy since a last few weeks. After being slow (well almost non-existent) for a couple of quarters, hiring is back on the agenda. And with a bang! New project wins have been quite impressive in the last couple of months and all indications are towards a stronger demand in coming quarters (hopefully years!). No wonder some of these requirements are URGENT! You know how it is after clients sign on the dotted line. They want everything as on yesterday. No worries – that’s anyways – what I call – “a good problem to deal with”.
Amit Garg | September 18th, 2009
When new employees join at Upside Learning, I tell them – “Making mistakes is ok because you learn from them and that’s the real value of a mistake as it gets you ready for success. So go ahead, work with a free mind, give your best, and everything else would be fine”. Note that it’s not a license to make mistakes it is the freedom to try your best and be ok when you make mistakes. I also tell them “while committing mistakes is ok, repeating them is not, as then the mistake is really costly – to them and to the company, as we did not get anything (hoping for some learning there) out of it”
It’s been an interesting start of the week, with the tiny Regifting game going viral of sorts within our office. Hit the jump and you’ll see just why.
http://www.regiftable.com/regiftingrobinpopup.html
In November 1959, Donald Kirkpatrick published a series of seminal articles on training evaluation in the ‘Journal of the ASTD’. In the fifty years since, his thoughts (Reaction, Learning, Behavior, and Results) have gone on to evolve into the legendary Kirkpatrick’s Four Level Evaluation Model and become the basis on which learning & development departments can show the value of training to the business. How has the model evolved over fifty years, is it still relevant? As designers of learning, have we applied the model with Don’s intent?
I’ve been occupied with writing a paper to promote the adoption of mobile learning amongst corporates and enterprises. While trawling through multiple web-links, a pattern of myths about mobile learning emerges. Quite a bit of back and forth about these myths – I’m taking the liberty of listing and describing the five that struck me as odd, and am attempting to debunk them to an extent. I’ll be the first to admit there is always an element of truth behind myths; but with the rate of technological change, quite a few of those ‘truths’ would seem like falsehoods today.
Soon after I posted These are Not Serious Games on the blog and as a discussion on Linked-In, there was a flurry of comments over a couple of days that quickly covered some thoughts about Serious Games.
