I wrote a while ago about measurement for measurement’s sake. It creates problems when we focus on measuring inputs and superficial outputs whilst we ignore the longer term outcomes.

It came up again this week at Learning Pool Live. The Learning Pool event is split over 3 weeks and 3 venues; this week’s was in Sheffield with 100+ learning development professionals primarily from the public and third sector. I was lucky enough to be answering questions on a panel along with Denise Hudson Lawson and Steve Wheeler. There were a range of questions and a few seemed to link to what L&D needs to do to remain relevant to the business. Denise’s final comment to the audience was to ditch happy sheets and I concur; as I said on the day, I think we’ve created an industry and culture of ‘busyness’ where people collect data that has little meaning or value to the business goals of the organisation.

Aside from the panel discussion,  I was lucky enough to be able to hear Steve and Denise explain their thinking behind their approaches to learning in the form of their keynotes. Steve expressed some great thoughts about how new technologies will impact on learning whilst Denise explained how she removed class rooms from her offer. Both resonated with me, especially as we’re approaching learning in a similar vein. Both fascinating speakers and well worth a listen. More surprising is that we’re still having to maintain what Charles Jennings was saying to Learning Pool attendees 2 and a half years ago

We were also fortunate to be able to work together in a session about mobile learning.  Consider Charles’ comments about courses in the video above and assume that you’re not approaching mobile from a course bias. The possibilities jumped onto the page since we challenged ourselves to think of the uses of mobile and then to decide how we’d think about it from a learning perspective.

This fundamentally changes the way you approach a solution. As Steve has written,

Who knew that there was a link between GPS, geocaching, bumpsharing and airdropping?

The next step for us is to think about these options and ideas before next week when we’re at the next phase of the Learning Pool Live events in Cardiff. Steve’s hypothesised a few ideas on his blog; I’m thinking about the augmented reality aspect – imagine adding a job aid that the person can access by holding up a device to an image, icon, QR code or tag?

Were you at the event – what did you think? What learning can we pull from mobile ideas? Let me know below.