All learning, great and small
Atul Patel from the Centre for Charity Effectiveness was with us to deliver a workshop on Action Learning Sets.
I asked him two questions, firstly, what examples had he seen of charities using learning and development to beat the credit crunch and secondly, what is he excited about in l&d right now.
Atul is a dude.
Atul Patel from Alex Dawson on Vimeo.
Football is part of the fabric of my life. That’s a grandiose and almost meaningless statement, but it is still the truth. I met my wife through football, I made my best friends through football and I share football with my father. I am a football coach and the ideas I encounter through thinking about the game enrich my professional life.
You cannot have any kind of interest in football and be unaware that it is criminal when fathers, sons, daughters, cousins and friends go to watch a football match and don’t go home.
Reflecting on the 20:20 from Alex Dawson on Vimeo.
The people I enjoy following on Twitter are the folk who are the best at answering the question that lies at the very heart of the tool itself…
What are you doing?
People like Tom Barrett, Karen Romeis and Jackie Cameron tell me what they’re up, the ideas they are having and the challenges that they might be facing. I’m interested in what they have to say, perhaps because they are able to convey that they are interested in what they are doing. They show passion and they speak about learning with passion, which makes me feel I can learn something from them.
Many of the people I follow on Twitter I have sought out because they work on the fields of coaching or learning and development. I’ve picked up some really good ideas from them. For instance, it was Mike Morrison tweeting about his post on Pecha Kucha that gave me the idea of using this structure at work. Too often though, I feel that a lot of the l&d people I’m following are just churning out endless ‘thought for the day’ style tweets: inspirational quotes, management tools, theories and maxims. I feel like I’m being force-fed ideas which mean nothing to me. It’s just noise.
The frutstrating thing is that I’m sure I’d have lots to learn from these people, if only they would tell me what it is that they’re up to rather than trying to blind me with their knowledge and the strength of their networks.
I think it’s time for another cull.