‘Even if you’re on the right track you’ll get run over if you just sit there.’
Will Rogers

Here we are collaborating like mid-day mad-dogs and, as Katrina and the Waves said, ‘Don’t it Feel Good’.

Pardon the buzzwords but, I think collaboration can become one of our core competencies. As we learn lessons and deploy tools on our path to site-wide web migration we should keep in mind that these same processes can work for us in other important arenas.

Let’s take one example – training.

Learning new skills and refining old ones is essential if we are to stay valuable, current, and marketable in the workplace, but budgetary constraints have forced most organizations to down-size their training staff and roll-back expenditures for contracted training sessions.
We can’t allow this to become an excuse to neglect the vital role that in-house training plays.
We can leverage our individual skills and sharing technologies to create a personalized training regimen more flexible and less costly than older methods.

Six months ago I took a week long course on the Stellent CMS, commuting daily to a polished office building in NW Washington.
What an abysmal waste of my time and taxpayer money!
Not that the teacher wasn’t charming and the lab hi-tech, but six months later I haven’t used any of the skills I ‘learned’.
Hey, I barely remember what I did last week much less last fall.

Recent studies in online learning have shown we learn best when…
1/ we can apply the material immediately into our daily work.
2/ we can learn at our own pace.
3/ we can learn just what we need and just when we need it.
4/ we use a hands-on, problem solving approach.
5/ we are in an informal and comfortable setting.

Current trends support the notion that asynchronous learning is best absorbed when joined with synchronous learning that supports a live student/teacher experience be it face-to-face, or Instant Messaging.

Here’s what one expert has to say:

‘A major prerequisite for workflow learning is a culture that fosters collaboration and sharing, that rewards (rather than punishes) individual support initiatives, that builds a fundamental responsibility for informal coaching and mentoring into every employee’s job description, and that places as much value on time spent helping others perform as it does on time spent performing’.
Godfrey Parkin