The Future of Workplace Learning (and this blog)

I've moved to a new site. It's called Hypergogue.

There were loads of reasons for the move. Here they are, in no particular order (hopefully, they'll give a sense of what I'm trying to do at the new blog):

1. I wasn't posting much here. One way to approach this might have been some variant on GTD. My advice for people interested in Getting Things Done is to set aside all that productivity mumbo-jumbo until you're ready to optimise. If you're not doing what you want to do, it's not because you need a new calendar app, but because you have no real clear idea of what you want to do.

2. I failed. I set out to write a blog about learning for non-learning professionals. And by 'non-learning professionals' what I really meant was 'customers'. This blog failed as a marketing tool – although I have made lots of friends and been invited to conferences.

3. Blogger. Meh. If you're even vaguely serious about blogging, host your own Wordpress site.

4. When I started here I was full of enthusiasm for the concept of the rhizome. (Bunchberries and ferns are both rhizomatous plants.) I put this down to mid-life crisis.

These are the things I can put my finger on.

But there were also some things that I became aware that I felt/believed as a direct result of writing this blog. They seemed important enough to me that they needed a visible marker to show that I'd moved on:

5. Many Learning Professionals (and most 'teacher-training' courses, or their variants for trainers) have at their heart a psychological kernel. This, to put it mildly, is a massive distraction from the real business at hand. The real business is cyborgs.

6. That last one is so important, it's probably worth repeating again. The heart of every Learning Professional's trade should be the construction and navigation of performance support systems. All the psychological stuff (as well as the crypto-political theoretical stuff) is a red herring.

7. Learning Professionals are designers first and foremost. There is no workable theory that you can apply in order to produce good learning. There's only design and practice. The idea of a qualified [insert job title of learning prof here] is mostly a fiction of convenience, or a function of economics.

It's true that you can't scale teacher training without a theoretical underpinning. But then you have to grow up and deal with the real world.

8. The Learning Professions are abuzz with all the 'new' stuff that's been happening on the web and in society (with the abuzzness being roughly proportional to how much that particular sector is shielded by regulation and/or tradition).

What's happened so far is as nothing to what will come.

As an example, if you speak to informed Training & Development strategy people they will all say that we're seeing a trend towards 'performance support' and away from learning. Actually, though, trainers have always worked in 'performance support'. Trainers have always known they're there to 'help people learn'. But many of them failed to spot the hidden end of that sentence - trainers help people to learn how to use performance support systems. 'Teachers', by the way, are no different in this respect.

Augmented Reality is just one of the things on the horizon (3D printing is another) that will change the face of the world of work at least as much as the internet.

Most teachers and trainers can't compete with Augmented Reality. Pedagogy is a function of opacity.

9. My predictions about the future of workplace learning will probably be wrong. I've probably been too cautious.

10. Superstar teachers

11. Auto-education

There's probably more. But that'll do.

Hope to see you at the new blog!