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Blog post by Microsoft for Work, May 19, 2014. Excerpt: "Social, collaboration, and communication tools give your employees the power to get Work done anywhere, on any device. Instant messaging tools can connect colleagues for immediate answers, while sharing documents lets Workers collaborate in real time on projects. Giving employees a place to voice seemingly crazy ideas can, in the end, help your business capitalize on new opportunities and deliver better customer experiences. As long as you have policies in place for internal and external social media, your organization can expect the same high level of Work, while raising the bar for innovation. And remember: Implementing social solutions doesn't have to be complicated. You can seamlessly weave too"

Article by Lydia Dishman, April 2015 on how attitudes are changing about work "How Job Candidates Are Judged Only a small percentage (11.9%) of global workers say they wouldn't hire someone without a LinkedIn profile. Professional profiles are, not surprisingly, ranked for these top factors: work experience (56.4%) education history (28.6%) volunteer experience (16.6%)"

Free Ebook from Jacob Morgan: 5 Ways People Over 50 Can Stay Relevant. How Older Workers Can Embrace the Coming Changes and Stay Relevant in the Future of Work. Has info on what does the future of Work look like for the 50+ population; The 5 key trends shaping the future of Work; Why you need to embrace the coming changes; The 5 ways older Workers can embrace these changes and stay relevant in the changing world of Work; Specific actions that you can take to help future-proof your career.

Upcoming workshop by Jane Bozarth on working out loud, December 19, 2014, online. When you ask, What does learning look like? no one answers, Someone talking in front of a room. We learn by doing, and by telling what we're doing, and by watching others do things, and by showing others how we did something. Narrating work can solve so many problems for both organizations and individuals, from capturing tacit knowledge, to easing transitions when workers depart, to reducing duplication of effort, to further enabling informal and social learning. What does it look like, and how can Training & Development (T&D) help it happen?

a wonderful blog post by Jim McGee, April 1, 2002, on the importance of keeping a knowledge-log--k-log--for being able to retrace one's steps when the final conclusion/work product falls short and one has to start over and for engaging with others about how the thought line developed. Justifies paper printouts and variously named file versions to show stages of idea exploration and development. Our electronic work flow replaces how we used to work with handwritten drafts with all the erasures and column notes, then send them to a graphics person for placing into a graphics format, then circulating for reaction from involved stakeholders, some of them junior staff, then incorporating feedback, final edits, and voila! a product for the client.

Lisa Earle McLeod posits that there is no work life vs non-work life, but that we have one life and creating congruence is the real key. "It's about living a life doing work that connects with the essence of who you really are."

This page focuses on the Towards Maturity Learning Landscape Audit (LLA)--survey tool to help businesses understand how their staff learn, both formally and informally. The few bullet points contrast the views of 2,000 randomly selected learners from the private sector with 500 L & D professionals--a wide gap exists with regard to how learners are learning and like to learn with what L & D professionals are doing. For instance, 80% of learners prefer work in collaboration with other team members whereas only 1 in five L & D managers surveyed actively encourage staff to help each other solve problems using social media.

excellent points for us to stress in our work, too.

Interesting blog post bu Elizabeth MacBride, April 5, 2013, on virtual partnerships, 5 secrets 1. must have the same agenda 2. you actually like the person 3. complementary skill sets or traits 4. open lines of communications 5. good legal underpinnings Excerpt "Our number-one rule - and the glue that holds our partnership together - is keeping the workload manageable. We don't take on too many clients, and we don't hold ourselves to unrealistic standards for production. "Our business is focused on helping people navigate a big, ongoing trend-the shift from traditional jobs to an economy built around freelance, contract and temporary work. Pulling all-nighters at the business and cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world, as we might at a venture-capital backed startup, doesn't seem like the right way for us," Pofeldt says. "Why not enjoy one of the best parts of freelancing: the freedom to have an active life outside of work without apologizing for it?" Barry "CB" Martin and Larry Gaian are food writers and marketers-for-hire who met via their common networks. "This year I started several new ventures," Martin wrote via email. "I asked him to be a sounding board. On one of the ideas, he was thinking along the same lines so we decided to combine forces." They're working together under the moniker Guys In Aprons, asking food companies to hire them to write recipe posts and interview expert chefs."

excellent explanation by Tom Vander Ark on why parent-managed learner profiles are becoming more important all the time for young people.  Is the corollary true for adults owning their learning in portable, digital carry-alongs for sharing with potential employers, etc.  

Research study by Gloria Mark, Stephen Voida, and Armand Cardeno, 2012 on impact of work with/without email "ABSTRACT We report on an empirical study where we cut off email usage for five workdays for 13 information workers in an organization. We employed both quantitative measures such as computer log data and ethnographic methods to compare a baseline condition (normal email usage) with our experimental manipulation (email cutoff). Our results show that without email, people multitasked less and had a longer task focus, as measured by a lower frequency of shifting between windows and a longer duration of time spent working in each computer window. Further, we directly measured stress using wearable heart rate monitors and found that stress, as measured by heart rate variability, was lower without email. Interview data were consistent with our quantitative measures, as participants reported being able to focus more on their tasks. We discuss the implications for managing email better in organizations" CONCLUSIONS Our study has shown that there are benefits to not being continually connected by email. Without email, our informants focused longer on their tasks, multitasked less, and had lower stress. It is an open question to what extent the effects we found in our study might be sustainable. How the benefits of reduced email usage might outweigh the known benefits of email in reaching larger numbers of people rapidly with information is not clear. What our study suggests is that the tradeoffs among email usage, work pace, stress, and collaboration need to be more closely explored. There will always be new "zombies" lurking with advances in information technology, and we must continue to be vigilant in assessing the human costs that are incurred when these advances are adopted in the workplace.

Great article on really working smart from Harvard Business Review. Meredith Fineman states complaining being too busy seems to be the new power status: I'm busier than you so I'm more important. She goes on to give examples from her life and experiences of what working smarter, not harder, really means in this world of overwhelm

Great article on really working smart from Harvard Business Review. Meredith Fineman states complaining being too busy seems to be the new power status: I'm busier than you so I'm more important. She goes on to give examples from her life and experiences of what working smarter, not harder, really means in this world of overwhelm

good article on how more work is shifting to an always-on demand model in order to succeed or at least stay employed. Mathew Ingram, August 20, 2015

Jane's advert for her next workshop where she explains what the course is and isn't.

"About This Video Many of the hurdles women face at work can be categorized into four patterns of bias. By seeing these patterns, women can stop feeling like their set-backs are purely personal failings, and start using the strategies outlined by Williams. ..."

Explains part-time work trends are worrisome, article by Ylan Q. Mui in Washington Post, July 2014 ""What we're seeing is a growing trend of low-quality part-time jobs," said Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair work Week Initiative, which is pushing for labor reforms. "It's creating this massive unproductive workforce that is unable to productively engage in their lives or in the economy.""

a blog post by Maish Nichani with PebbleRoad, 12/21/2009 on collaboration. Because they work on developing the technology, they use examples of well-matched technology and developed collaboration cultures and one "idiot" poorly matched tech/culture example.

excellent discussion of networks and social learning in organizations with references to Hart, Jennings, Cross, and Internet Time Alliance among others, 2010

From Arun Pradhan on LinkedIn based on the work of Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, and others. Explores the why and how of work and learning, and bursting the training bubble that positions learning as a separate event from the workflow.

Blog post by Jenny Mackness on April 24, 2012 announcing a MOOC on First Steps into Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, #fslt12, running from 5/21 to 6/22. Raises issues of how to engage with learners who may not be well-grounded in technology yet who might want to participate because of content, finding the right balance. Will offer certificate for "assessed" learners. Excerpt: "This is an exciting but rather daunting process. We have had lots of interest, with people from all over the world expressing interest in different aspects of learning and teaching in Higher Education. I am beginning to realize the amount of work that must go on behind the scenes in the other MOOCs I have attended. We have deliberately chosen to distribute the course across different platforms - WordPress (for the Home site), Moodle (for the course), Blackboard Collaborate (for the live synchronous sessions) and we are still discussing whether or not to have a separate wiki site, or to go with the wiki in Moodle. The reason for this decision (i.e. the different platforms) is that we hope to introduce participants new to teaching in HE to the idea that learning can take place in a variety of online spaces. Access to our WordPress site has been open pretty much from the word go, and now access to the Moodle site has been opened, despite the fact that neither of these is yet ready. For me, this is a new way of working and takes a bit of getting used to (heart in your mouth stuff!). Finally, we are conscious that the course has been designed to attract people for whom this way of working and the technology involved might be completely new -so we have to achieve the right balance between providing enough structure and support and encouraging open academic practice and independent learning - one of the many tensions involved in designing a MOOC."