Lately it seems that many bloggers are writing their last posts for the year and invariably, they’re called, “A Year in Review”.
Who am I not to jump on the bandwagon?
I’ve summarised my best posts for the year below but I’m going to start from April 2012 as prior to that, all I seemed to have written were book reviews. Since I am so far behind with my book review writing this year, (and trust me, there have been lots of books read thanks to my Kindle), let’s start with the posts that made some personal impact with me and that resonated with some readers. So here it goes…
April
A journey of angst as I struggle to develop professionally with inadequate tools in the workplace…
Personal Development in a Technology Restricted Workplace
May
A constant topic of discussion, debate and argument as the Learning and Development team working on an agile IT and systems transformation project come to terms that their ADDIE processes simply are too convoluted, detailed and unsuitable for a business who is dumbfounded when given with a 63 page Needs Analysis Report and still, no response to how training will be rolled out.
Is there any Agility in ADDIE?
June
The two breeds of instructional designers. Who are you? Part of the brown cardigan brigade adamant to stick with instructional design principles and creating facilitator led workshops to your heart’s content OR the hipster instructional designer?
What is the Instructional Designer Breed?
July
The month of true professional development with the conference that made a real impact on me followed up by work success. My instructional coaching model was selected as the framework for specialist skills coaching across the entire organisation – was given a budget and resources to formalise it and part of the organisational coaching curriculum. Dreams had all come true…
Personal Learning Environment Conference 2012
Old Coaching Framework Comes Good in the New World
August
My fascination that I have been knitting for over 30 years and I kept my craft and my work completely separated. My craft is my expression of creativity and meditation and one where I learn from experts who are scattered all around the world in a community where our passion drives us. Why hadn’t I made this connection sooner that this is what informal learning is all about?
What I Learned About Social Learning Came from Knitters
September
Donald Clark wrote a piece about an overhead projector and I had to share a funny story about them when I first started out in Learning and Development. Now, the only OHP I see on a weekly basis is the one in my father’s art studio where he uses it to project images onto a large canvas. Ah, my OHP you are missed…okay, maybe not.
Trials and Tribulations of the Overhead Projector
Jane Hart’s Top 100 tools is a great resource for me so I wrote what my Top 10 learning tools were for 2012. Interesting to note that I thought that Pinterest and Instagram were two applications that were going to be ‘Banished in the Great Cyberspace in the Sky’ (can I say that now or will it be confused with the cloud???) for me. I’ve moved to Flickr after the Instagram privacy debacle and well, I have reactivated Pinterest with the original intention of using it to capture learning tools pins but since then fashion, shoes, street art, photography and libraries have taken over…it’s a great daydreamer time waster application – of which I really don’t need….
October
My instructional coaching model that was rolled out across the business had some side effects that we hadn’t expected…
Meanwhile friends and family were having a hard time trying to find employment and lamented on how job seekers are treated when looking for employment.
The continual argument over meanings of words…
You Say Tomato, I say Tomatoe…
November
Obviously I’m still stunned about the link of my craft to social learning and I keep talking about it…
What we can learn from craft networks: Social Learning in action
I wrote this post after a webinar by Donald Taylor on a topic of the same name
What does L&D need to succeed in 21st century?
This year, I met a few people from my Personal Learning Network through Twitter. Here’s what I wrote…
December
The title says it all. I dropped out of Coursera’s How To Think and Reason MOOC. Pity, they even had Monty Python snippets to explain concepts and even that didn’t hold me because of work commitments. I’m not proud but I got swamped…
I’m a MOOC Dropout and not so proud
This will be a monthly ongoing feature of ”What I Learned in <Month>” as a rundown of all the professional development activities for that month – and an assurance that I’d have to post at least one blog post per month.
Feel Free to Share Your Thoughts