A little help from my friends

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My grandest project of 2018 has been writing a new book, which was commissioned by Kogan Page in January. Anyone who has authored a book will know how compelling, and also how lonely it can be. Throughout the year, the book has continuously exercised my mind, and I have spent countless hours of planning, thinking, researching, writing and editing.

I decided to call the book 'Digital Learning in Organisations' from the outset because my expertise lies in learning technologies. The departure is found in the locus - organisations. I have worked with many learning and development professionals over the last decade and have come to know many personally, but L and D is a less familiar terrain to me than school and university education. However, having worked in large organisations for more than 40 years, and having watched the rapid development of new technologies during that time, I feel I can write authoritatively about the challenges and innovations that are happening.

As you would guess, I have enlisted a little of help from my friends along the way, so writing has not been as lonely a task as it might have been. I'm grateful to many who have either encouraged me to write the book, or who have advised me in any specific way. The list is long. But I'm most grateful to those who have contributed directly to the book by responding to my interview questions. I will namecheck just a few here, to give you a flavour of their contributions, which may pique your interest in reading the entire book when it hits the bookshops in April 2019!

Here's David Kelly, New York based Executive director of the e-Learning Guild, with his view on mobile devices and learning:

“Mobile technologies shouldn’t be viewed through the lens of learning. They should be viewed through the lens of problem solving. That’s what this thing we call “self-directed learning” looks like anyway; it looks like problem solving and that’s what’s emerging within the world of digital learning.”

David goes on to consider a number of scenarios around the use of mobile learning in large organisations, and concludes that:

“.....mobile devices are a game changer for organizations – not in the context of mobile learning, but in the context of how they empower what it means to live, learn, and interact in a digital world. In that context, mobile devices are powering the future of digital learning.”

This is at once both inspirational and daunting - thanks David. Another thoughtful contribution comes from Julian Stodd, of the UK based firm Sea Salt Learning who shared some of his views on social media and learning:

“We have moved from a world where learning was substantially formal, codified, and owned, to a world where it is substantially, co-created, adaptive, geolocated, accessible, and evolutionary. Social collaborative technology has enabled the emergence of democratised, and substantially invisible, communities, where tacit, tribal, learning and sharing takes place at scale.”

Julian's views delineate much of the change that has taken place in the world of learning in the workplace over the last 10-15 years. His insight adds great value to the book. 

Digital Learning in Organisations is peppered with examples of innovation and change through learning, and the role digital technologies have played, especially by ground breaking companies like Sponge. You will find pithy quotes from many individuals I greatly respect in the industry, including Nigel Paine, Donald Clark, David Hopkins, Kate Graham, Harold Jarche (Canada), Helen Blunden (Australia) Donald H Taylor, Michele Ricci (Italy), Ajay Pangarkar (Canada) and Jane Bozarth (USA), and also a few of my own anecdotes, salutary tales, and humorous stories from when things didn't quite go according to plan! 

Do look out for Digital Learning in Organisations, which is published by Kogan Page on 3 April 2019. Advanced orders can be placed on Amazon.

A little help from my friends by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.