Image from FlickR Courtesy of kevin dooley

It’s quite incredible what you can do in 10 minutes on Twitter.

I spent 10 minutes looking through my feed and found:

• A picture using a neat app that highlights colours in photos
• A link to a free online conference I may join
• A link to some new fonts I can use in presentations
• A story about Harvard offering free online courses from next week
• An infographic highlighting why tablets and smartphones will kill TV adverts

To me, this is personal development now; structured courses you attend twice a year to get a tick in a book that confirms you are developing aren’t going to cut it any more.  I was in a session with staff members this week and we were discussing the knowledge and skills that will be needed in my organisation in the future.  I also asked the staff how they felt they should learn this knowledge and skills.  I was pleasantly surprised to hear that staff don’t want to come on courses, they want the choice of how to learn, to be given space to learn, to work with their managers to agree how to develop.  They asked for shadowing and mentoring; they want ebooks and shared practice; they want networks they can tune into to learn with and from.

The quick trawl through Twitter is a neat example of what I believe is ‘pulled’ learning; the learner finds the sources of information and draws down the information and support they need.  This learning isn’t pushed from a central L&D hub.  It’s not even via twice a year CPD events.

Most importantly, it’s not linear and I wonder why we try and make learning linear.  Is it to fit a LMS?

As always, any comments welcome.