Over the weekend the number of followers on my Twitter account, @C4LPT, passed 10,000 – so a big thank you to all of you who follow this account! Although in the Twitter world this is a relatively small number – compared with celebrities and other high profile accounts that have hundreds of thousands (even millions) of followers. – for me it was an important moment, because it made me pause to reflect on my current activities, how they are expanding and how they fit together. So just in case you were wondering, here is a quick guide to what I do and what I offer.
After 7 years operating another learning portal site, in 2006 I set up the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT) as a free resource site about technologies, tools and tips for learning – in both education and in the workplace. Although in principle, it covers a wide range of technologies, I have tended to specialize in the use of social media for learning.
However, as my own consultancy work has focused more and more on workplace learning, it has become clear that in this context “learning” no longer means just training – but also includes the vast amount of continuous, informal, learning that takes place in the flow of work – an area which has been overlooked for far too long. Social media are already beginning to play a big part here, such that “social learning” is now more about learning with others in the workflow – or “working smarter” as we call it in the Internet Time Alliance.
For organizations who want to reap the rewards of smarter working, this involves new thinking and new approaches; it is not a matter of just bolting-on the “social” to traditional, training methods, or using cookie-cutter approaches. I am therefore helping a growing number of organizations, who recognize they need to work smarter, to “do things differently”, and evolve their organization to one where working and learning are in a more symbiotic relationship (that reduces the need for inefficient and ineffective training). In the UK/Europe I operate through my own company, Tesserae, and internationally I work with Internet Time Alliance, where I am a Principal.
Although many people are using social media tools prolifically, others do need help both in understanding their value for their professional and organizations activities, as well as how to use them effectively, productively and safely. I therefore set up Social-Media-Coaches.com to support the use of social media for and in the workplace, and am building up a range of services – both for individuals who want to upskill themselves as well as organizations who want to help their people become more proficient in this area.
So with all these different activies – albeit overlapping – I tend to blog and tweet in different places for different purposes. So if you’d like to find out more about some of these areas, take a look at this summary image. And if you click on it, you will find a PDF with clickable links to all the sites.
