Sunday, October 5, 2008

Inspiration from Wikinonics

I began reading Wikinomics a week ago and it's been a start and stop process. I just got to chapter two and jumped to chapter 9. Chapter two talks about the younger generations and how they have grown up on the web and been collaborating with others across the street, across the state, and some across the world. Now this interests me from both a person and professional perspective. My children range in age from 29 to 16 so finding and researching information helps me to understand them better and how look at the world and why they may say and/do some of the things they say and/or do. I'm also a learning and performance trainer and part of my job is to find the most effective way to train the associates within the organization. So, the more I understand how peaple like to communicate and learn the better prepared I will be in delivering their training.

Chapter 9 as I mentioned earlier talks about the Geek Squad. Although familiar with it I had no knowledge of the history of how it came to be. Kudo's to Robert Stephens for seeing a need and being so innovative coming up with the Geek Squad.

The timing of my class at Drake and the reading of Wikinomics could not have been better if planned. My team of trainers along with our corporated training team partner each year to invite all trainers within the organization for what we call Trainers' Institute. This year will the be our seventh year we sponsored this event. Each one has grown in size and each year we had to look for larger space to accomodate all of the trainers'coming from all over the country.

Last year with budget constraints we decided to have the event online using our training platform WebEx. We could accomodate more trainers' without travel expenses, hotel accomodations or food. We are repeating that delivery again this year. We are always looking for interesting topics to deliver to our trainers that will help them be more effective. One associate who is an IT trainer is going to present on Second Life. I can't wait to see the responses from our audiences. I'm sure we willhave some like Ric who have experience with this type of technology but there will also be many who will be blown away with the idea of using this as an educational tool.

I can't wait. Well on to more reading and research.

See you next time.

2 comments:

Lauren said...

I found chapter 9 very interesting as well. I had never heard of the 'Geek Squad' until Best Buy was advertising the Squad as a part of their services. What a great and innovative idea! I agree with the thought in chapter 9 that our companies are growing outside of the typical roles and hierarchy of employees as well as becoming more complex (i.e. globalized collaboration/teamwork). I have noticed at my company, that we all assist one another in many areas no matter what our position. I see this the most with process issues and technology. We all have something to offer and have each learned different technological skills and are able to teach and share with one another. This is especially true for the younger generation of employees and what they have to share regarding new technology with the older generations.

tekster said...

I had never even heard of second life until our class. I will be very curious to read about how your training goes...you will just have to keep blogging! I can't even imagine something like that within a training environment but then again why not something like that?!