There is a growing phenomenon toward collaborative learning in the workplace. This phenomenon reaches beyond the borders of offices and educational institutions and leverages the resources of a global community. The Learning Power Pad is my personal attempt at pooling collective intelligences and contributing to a global community of education / training and development professionals. As an educator and 21st century learner, I plan to chronicle experiences, insights, and practical wisdom relevant to professionals and academics in this field.
My perspective is unique in that I’ve worked in Corporate America for more than 18 years – primarily in sales and customer service management. Throughout my career, I’ve fallen into roles that require training and coaching skills. I suppose this is because nurturing the development of others comes naturally for me. Recently, I’ve worked as a project manager and facilitator in an urban business high school, and I’ve done training & development as a major function of managing U.S. Census Bureau staff. I’m pursuing formal graduate studies in instructional design to build greater capacity for doing the work that I love.
Since the focus of this blog page is informal learning and collaboration, I’ll start by providing a few links to information that you might find useful:
Find tips on soft skills development topics like time management, goal setting, team building, and the like. You can also find design and assessment tools. You may subscribe to the site in general and/or specific blogs.
Having taught in a progressive urban high school, Chris Lehmann’s Practical Theory blog is of particular interest to me. Lehmann is the founding principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA. The Academy employs a project-based program of instruction much like the one that I operated in for the business high school in Milwaukee. The school has received numerous awards since its founding in 2006 and, amongst other accomplishments; the founder was named one of the "30 Most Influential People in EdTech" by Technology & Learning Magazine in 2010. Chris Lehmann’s blog covers topics from current news in education, assessment trends, and the integration of technology into the process of learning. Other posts have addressed topics like plagiarism, paying for college, and Google applications.
ASTD (American Society for Training & Development) is a member organization committed to providing resources to professionals in industrial and other workforce training environments. The organization has several blogs and discussion board, but this one in particular, is dedicated to e-learning topics. The goal of the Learning Circuits website is, “to promote and aid the use of e-learning, creating a body of knowledge about how to use technology efficiently and effectively for learning.”
ASTD (American Society for Training & Development) also has an official blog that is more news oriented. Here, you can discover what’s working for training and development practitioners and which companies are leading the industry in innovations and performance.
No comments:
Post a Comment