Web 2.0 applications are revolutionising how we interact with information. Our personal information currency helps us stay valuable to our customers and our employer. So, it makes sense for learning practitioners to work with IT to develop initiatives that enable employees to stay current and be ‘entrepreneurial’.
Of course, some employees will have developed their own information management strategies using technologies commonly only accessible from home; RSS aggregators such as Netvibes, podcasts downloaded from ITunes, YouTube alerts of topics of interest, LinkedIn networks, just to name a few. These technologies support informal, self-directed learning.
Our role as learning practitioners can be to help employees develop skills in self-management and digital literacy by blending these technologies into our soft skill programs. For example, podcast in-house experts on leadership, provide syndicated newsfeeds of trends in management theory, encourage the CEO to blog every couple of days.
We can also be advocates to learning self-enablement by encouraging IT to emulate the web-based tools people use at home. This helps change management and technology adoption.
