In a virtually rambling and incoherent blog post, BFChirpy seems to write about metrics, knowledge and such stuff. Take a quick look. A great example of self-indulgent writing and thinking, AND the common extreme self-centeredness of almost all the most active social media pundits and fringe members.
I posted a response on the blog, but you never know what sticks so here’s mine: Continue reading
So, tell me. If I happen to go to the water cooler down the hall, and bump into George, who tells me about the new software I could use, is that informal learning? Sounds like it.
We don’t know what position Social Learning plays on this team. And you know what? I don’t give a damn, and neither do the customers and clients of trainers and educators.
You’d be surprised how many trainers believe that training and learning mean the same thing, which is one of the scariest indictments of at least some trainers one can imagine. It’s like not understanding the difference between driving a car or riding in a car. Or listening and speaking. Or being sick and doctoring the sick.
I’ve seen literally dozens of people who actually train people blatantly suggest they are the same. Here’s additional comment.
We know from psychological research that human beings tend to discount information, data, or viewpoints that conflict with their pre-existing positions on any issue. We all do that to some degree. What is jarring is seeing learning professionals, trainers and teachers deliberately avoiding interacting with those who have views different from their’s.
I’ve seen this among the leading proponents of social networking as it is used to promote learning, i.e., social learning people. For example, Elliott Mazie, an elearning guru refused public discussion on an article he posted that clearly mis-stated some research numbers. Others have done similar things on Twitter. In fact, when challenged on the basic tenets of social learning dogma, the majority shut down. Avoid & deny.
I’ve pointed out that the numbers oft quoted with reference to the percentages of meaning that come from verbal, and non-verbal cues, and attributed to Meharabian, were never actually said by him, at least in the way that is commonly understood.
So I was looking forward to seeing a video entitled “Busting the Meharabian Myth” which explains why Meharabian was wrong. Of course he never said what people think he said, so there some strange irony here, in that the video which is quite charming, continues to propagate the incorrect idea that Meharabian said what they think he said.
You’d expect more. These are educated, intelligent people who, in general, have achieve some level of success in their careers. No failures here. Yet, you’d expect more of an awareness of what they are doing and how they are treating people who don’t agree with their positions. You’d expect more critical thinking. You’d expect more of a desire to debate and discuss with peple who disagree, if only to learn. After all, these ARE learning professionals.
These are the people who are promoting social media and social learning as solutions to a wide variety of problems, although often they don’t specifically state what business problems would be amenable to social media. It’s understandable that there will be zealots. There were television zealots who told us that TV would revolutionize how people learn, and computer based instruction zealots who told us the same for computers and instruction. Continue reading
It is no secret that I believe adult learning principles and styles are essentially vague and useless in terms of instructing “adults” versus “non-adults” and that the work of many popular adult learning “experts” is terrible, and that includes Knowles. I’m not alone in that respect.
So I was browsing around and came across a well written article entitled How to Use Adult Learning Principles and Styles in Your Next Course, which I believe is typical of the thinking in that field. Despite the fact that it is well written, and clear, it’s nonsense, and it doesn’t even take much thought to realize it IS nonsense. Why many people can’t see the lack of clothing on this particular emperor is beyond me.
Super Duper E-Trashcan Made Specially as a Receptacle to Idiot E-Fads.
Some of you may know that the ASTD Conference concluded last week (American Society For Training and Development). A few people took the time and made the effort to either inform during the conference, or write up their impressions after the conference, and no doubt, they should be commended for the spirit of sharing.
Earlier today I announced the creation of a twitter hashtag, #trdev so people wanting to create a training and development community of practice on twitter could find each other, and interact. We have additional plans to make this work. However it will NOT work if the tag is used for NON-RELATED tweets.
Within 3 hrs. of announcing the tag, providing instructions for use, etc, Doug Constant @onpointcoaching started spamming the tag with messages of various types NONE of which pertain at all to the topic. You can see for yourself what he is doing by doing a search within twitter for #trdev, and you can see what appears to be a deliberate attempt to prevent you and I from creating this community.
I was doing a lot of searching on the Internet to provide content for our new TrDev Toolbar (described elsewhere), and so I’ve been coming across some interesting things. One of the most interesting comments went like this:
“I blogged about this topic….”