As you will see, these tools can be found for free on the web. Many can even be installed for free in-house. The problem is that many organizations frown on using unsecured external services and convincing them to provide these services in-house may be difficult. For State of Utah agencies that use the Career Management Services (CMS) system, most of these social media functions are already paid for and available in CMS…they just need to be tweaked for the organization’s purposes and turned on.

Social Media 3:44 min. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE

• This is a good overview to start with
• CMS allows for rankings, reviews, ratings, meta data, search, communities etc.
• CMS also allows for control of who can participate in each community

Blogs 2:58 min. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI

• This would be very helpful to connect state and regional trainers as well as policy specialists and SMEs
• CMS provides this functionality

Wikis 3:52 min. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY

• Related to blogs, but more focused on collaborative group work
• CMS allows this sort of collaborative work on shared documents, with version tracking

RSS Feeds 3:44 min. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

• This is like the subscription service in CMS collaboration
• It allows a person to know when wikis, blogs, documents, comments etc are updated so they can keep up with the changes without having to check if something has changed

Social Bookmarking 3:25 min. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x66lV7GOcNU

• Possibilities: Share good web resource amongst designers, developers, team or UTC

Discussion Boards- there is not a video for this one, but it is a feature of CMS

We can be both more responsive, and more effective, in meeting the rapidly changing learning needs of employees if we take a more comprehensive view of what we can do to support learning and skill building. Designing comprehensive learning environments
should be our new standard.

We must be THE experts at delivering performer capability – to ensure that employees have the knowledge and skills they need to get the job done well. We can’t simply create high-tech spot solutions, or respond impulsively to learners’ (and managers’) desires to employ “Learning 2.0” technologies. We must know the variety of tools and techniques, both high-tech and simple, that can generate learning, and support application of that learning in the workplace. We must educate ourselves on what makes each of these components and techniques effective, and we must learn how to design, develop, and implement them efficiently and effectively.

Dr. Lombardozzi’s blog can be found at http://learningjournal.wordpress.com/

Also, you may want to become a member of the eLearning Guild–it’s free. They send out a weekly eMagazine (where I got this article) that has very insightful articles and other helpful resources.

What did you learn about your training system from completing this analysis? Please share. (See instructions in the Post Workshop Activity Guide.)

Questions for Thought
Do you agree or disagree? How might this information change the way you do things. Please leave your comments, or comment about someone else’s comments. Let’s talk!

When leaving comments, please indicate which article you are referring to.

If you have an example, please include the URL in your comment.

Feel free to leave a comment. If you have a  good example of technology that supports formal or informal learning please include the URL in your comment.

• Quinten’s grid
• Additional grids will be added here

Leave us your comments. What is on your grid that we may find helpful?

Training for Performance

The workshop covered ways to extend formal training’s reach outside the classroom. As an example of informal teaching tools and techniques, this site provides practice activities that will help you continue learning and building skills after the workshop.

The most effective informal learning takes place with other people, so feel free to join in the discussion. Let’s continue learning together.