I stumbled on the ASTD State of The Industry Report 2011 yesterday – find it here.

The title proudly claims “Increased Commitment to Workplace Learning” and that is indeed heartening to see. Not just because it means constant business for us but also because it means the top bosses recognize the importance of workplace learning more that they did a couple of decades back. It was commonplace to find training budgets be the first ones to slashed when downturn hits.

Mobile technology, having seeped into popular culture, is now finding widespread acceptance as a training and learning device in the workplace as well. If not already adopted, mobile learning is now certainly featuring in most strategy discussions within L&D teams in large and small enterprises.

Even though some large organizations have started using mobile technology to empower their workforce, for most others the question still remains – how do we actually use it in the workplace? Training departments are unsure how to design, develop and implement a successful mLearning strategy that works for their organizations.

I found this talk by Jason Fried  about how we work in an office quite interesting.

“The real problems in the office are the M&Ms” – managers and meetings make employees unproductive.

All the more reason for eLearning, anytime, anywhere; let people decide what’s appropriate to learn and when to learn it. You can’t do that with scheduled training.

Mobile learning is certainly a hot discussion topic with elearning and training solutions providers in Australia – like anywhere else in the world. In my meetings with clients and prospects in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne over that last couple of weeks, it is clear that the interest in mobile learning is very strong. Yet, the most common question is – how do we actually use it in workplace?

I’m of the opinion that there are 3 primary types of usage for mobile devices in the context of learning.

John Hegel lll and John Seely Brown have written an article titled ‘Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work’ on HBR blog. The article summarizes the ideas from their new book – The Power of Pull.

I just concluded a week-long trip to Saudi Arabia – my first to the middle-east region. Apart from a delayed immigration & customs clearance at Riyadh (which I am told is a norm at Riyadh) the experience was wonderful. Saudi Arabia is like any other developed country – you can see wide roads, big cars (GMC trucks abound), tall swanky buildings, malls with all the expensive brand names. The usual transnationals – McDonalds, KFC, Starbucks, and Dunkin Donuts all make their presence felt. I also found some great Indian food too.

When eLearning came into being through its early predecessors in the form of CBT and then WBT one of the primary reasons and its drivers was increasing acceptance of its potential to save costs due to the inherent advantages in centralizing (more with WBT) content, the reduction in logistics costs, persistent storage and to an extent uniformity in content delivery. It soon caught on as a medium which is now used as a part of learning strategy (in context of workplace learning) and not only helped companies save costs on a recurring basis but it evolved as a ‘learning’ delivery medium.

In a couple of years, microblogging tools have become very popular.  Twitter has become the number 1 tool for learning in just three years – voted by hundreds of learning professionals in this survey at Jane Hart’s site. Microblogging platforms are a great tool to keep you updated with latest trends & get real time support or answers to questions. You could even search for information on these tools themselves and get some good links to follow.

The web is abuzz with talk of Google Buzz.

So what is Buzz – simply put it’s a personal aggregator that is coupled to your Gmail account. Buzz is to email what Wave will eventually be to real-time collaboration around email thread and embedded documents or media.

What does buzz do? Let Google do the explaining –

The iPad is here. After all the hype, which it didn’t quite live up to, there was a lot of commentary web-wide on whether it’s suitable for elearning, or a specific type of learning. Here at Upside our camp is divided, there are iPad lovers and there are iPad baiters. The lovers are typically Apple fan-boys who are crazy about anything Apple, so their devotion to any bit of technology that Steve Jobs throws into the market is taken for granted. The baiters are mostly alternate technology lovers and who will hate pretty much anything that Apple develops; simply because of Apple’s “captive/lock-in users” business model.

From Wikipedia – Microlearning deals with relatively small learning units and short-term learning activities. Generally, the term ‘microlearning’ refers to micro-perspectives in the context of learning, education and training. More frequently, the term is used in the domain of E-learning and related fields in the sense of a new paradigmatic perspective on learning processes in mediated environments on micro levels.