IITT, walkthe.net and Birmingham

A UK work colleague warned me about an expression 'being sent to Coventry'. But I went anyway last Friday. I  presented walkthe.net to the judges of the 2011 IT Training Institute awards for the category 'Innovation of the year'. My presentation came down to the key fact that web walks are a competence building / learning activity fit for the network age.

We thought we had corporate training figured out, just as we thought we had business figured out. But hey, in business is suddenly makes sense to give your products away for free, to start up your company globally, to serve niche markets, or to motivate people without sticks or bags of money. Frankly, the Internet is to blame / to praise for all these changes. Likewise in corporate training:

• Suddenly creating content is not the key focus anymore. The content probably exists. The focus is on finding the right content snippets, and putting that in a context, together with reflection and action. This is why web walks leverage content from allover the net and present that in exploration steps.
• Training programs can be in permanent flow and permanent beta stage too. Go step by step, grow where needed, adapt with the topic and audience. The traditional way wants to release training when it is all done and done and validated by 75 stakeholders. Problem with that: business moves quicker than training. Web walks are a natural metaphore to literally go step by step.
• Informal learning is there, is big, and should count for something. Why dismiss 80% of the body of knowledge people build on the workplace as 'it never happened,you can't prove anything'. That is why web walks have badges for succesful completion.
• Not just individuals learn. In fact, for any service or performance done by your corporation, you need to have competent teams, not just individuals. So all pages in walkthe.net have a social bar at the right side, be it for commenting to the public or to your circle of friends, be it for recommendations based on your network.
• Action and learning go hand in hand. Most of corporate training has action/performance objectives. So put that in the program from the start. Separating learning and doing is so very artificial, and a well known mechanism to let people forget even more. So web walks have action steps.

We'll see on the 3rd of February how convincing my case for the jury was.

As it was cheaper to book me a hotel room for the weekend in Birmingham than to fly back the same day, I've been spending a day here with the 'brummers'. Did not know what to expect, but as I'm a fan of modern architecture the Selfridges building was a must see. Funny world: so I came all the way from Berlin just last week to find out that Birmingham hosts .... the UK's biggest German Christmas market outside of Germany!