Back when I was working in corporate learning and development, when the mere mention of the two words “competency frameworks” in any team meeting, there was an audible groan. My experience of these have always been negative. Although I’ve never been involved in creating one, it seemed that I was always in departments that had […]
Books Are My Drugs
Recently I’ve been spending more hours reading than doing anything else. Truth be told, this year, my reading of novels had taken a turn for the worse. The recent books on the seller’s shelves were really doing nothing for me. In the last couple of months, I was unable to finish the novels selected by […]
Apprendre le Francais
My recent trip to Strasbourg re-inspired my love of the French language. I learned French in high school and studied it for six years. At the time, I recall people telling me that I was wasting one subject at school when I should have focussed on an additional maths or science subject. However, I loved […]
Dedicate Time For Self-Driven Personal Learning At Work
One of the days that I look forward to at the company I work at Adopt and Embrace is that we have dedicated “Learning Days” every quarter set aside where the entire day is spent on self-driven learning. During Learning Days, we are free to spend the entire day learning what we want as long […]
Create Your Personalised Learning Plan with Adaptive Cards to Microsoft Teams
Last year I used the article by Luise Freese (@luisefreese) on Adaptive Cards for Beginners: How to Monitor a Hashtag on Twitter . The idea is that you can create a card that automatically goes into your selected channel in Microsoft Teams that triggers an action on your part: namely to explore the topic of […]
Don’t Wait Around for Learning to Happen to You
It strikes me as weird to have to say this but if you’re not actively learning something new in your work day, no matter how small, then how on earth are you surviving the mind numbing work day? This could mean: A tip a co-worker shared about streamlining a process that helps minimise some time […]
Book Tube Reviews
I love to read. A couple of years back I decided to read more fiction as a means of getting my focus back and I wrote about it in the post Reading Books as Sense Making. At the same time, I was also watching many Book Tubers review their books online so I thought I’d […]
What Am I Grateful For?
When I reflect on the last couple of years, I can’t help but think that I have been lucky to have different opportunities come my way in my work and life. The last seven or so years have been the biggest for me and the irony is not lost that this magical spiritual number of […]
My Trip to Frankfurt and Strasbourg Before LearnTec2020
One of the things that I love to do is to travel as much as possible. If I could do this more often, I would. Therefore, when I get asked to present at conferences overseas, I will make every effort to pack as much in so that I can have my travel bug sated. This […]
Incorporating Learning into the Workplace: Lessons of LearnTec2020
This year I had the wonderful opportunity upon invitation by Jane Hart (@c4lpt) to present at LearnTec2020, Europe’s largest technology conference. I jumped at the chance more so with the opportunity to work with Jane directly – and to also meet Jane Bozarth (@janebozarth) in person who for many years, I’ve been chatting with online […]
Emotional
You would have had to been under a rock these last few weeks if you haven’t seen the total loss and devastation of our bush caused by fires. It’s still hard to believe and come to terms with what happened – and is still happening – in our lovely country and I’m at a loss […]
The Expertise Economy – Book Club
Started the Expertise Economy by @kellylpalmer today with big thanks to @srjf for pointing me out to it. It’s my Christmas reading. So far, so good! pic.twitter.com/oRG8yRNDSy — Helen Blunden #AlwaysBeLearning????? (@ActivateLearn) December 24, 2019 The following are my responses to Simon Fogg’s (@srjf) book club questions for The Expertise Economy by David Blake and […]
2019 The Year I Found the Cursed Breadfruit
Everyone knows I’m obsessed with the story of William Bligh and the Mutiny on the Bounty. I’ve written about it countless times in this blog as it reignited a curiosity and love of learning of maritime history. Imagine my surprise this year when I finally came upon the breadfruit tree in Hawaii. I even tried […]
Random Morning Thoughts About Information Served Up to Us by AI
Every morning, I go for my walk and like to listen to podcasts. Usually these make me think about something or another and send me down rabbit warrens to explore. This week I decided to listen to Learning Uncut the podcast by Michelle Ockers (@michelleockers), Karen Moloney (@karenmoloney) and Amanda Ashby which was on “Democratising […]
Modern Workplace at Microsoft Ignite & Thoughts about Social Learning
There was a lot happening at Microsoft Ignite when I was there early in November in Orlando and to date, remains one of the best technology conferences I’ve ever been to – for sheer size and scale but mainly, for the mind blowing applications of modern workplace programs and the realisation that the way of […]
We Wrote a Book on Microsoft Teams But Who’s It For?
This morning I put down some thoughts into Twitter about who may benefit from buying our book that we wrote at Adopt & Embrace on Microsoft Teams. I wanted to collect my tweets here before they got lost into the Twittersphere Never Miss a Blog – Subscribe to Receive a Monthly Email Email Address First […]
Random Thoughts for LearnTec2020 Presentation
This morning I had some thoughts about what to do for my upcoming presentation for LearnTec2020 in Germany on 28-30 January so here are my thought in a screen dump of tweets. I didn’t want them to get lost in cyberspace so putting them into my blog. I will be teasing out this session over […]
Reflections on the Train Journey
I’ve downloaded the WordPress app on my phone and I’m going to have a go at “mobile blogging”. Collecting random thoughts in draft blog posts so that I can set aside time to pull them together into a cohesive piece a bit later on. What’s been on my mind lately is the plethora of articles […]
The Case For Social Networks
By now if you haven’t seen Sasha Baron Cohen’s speech about Facebook being the greatest propaganda machine in history, do yourself a favour and watch it. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about social networks and this week, in particular, being International Work Out Loud Week, lots of reflection was all about how somehow, in […]
Wrap Up from International Work Out Loud Week
Well another end to International Work Out Loud Week this year. Technically, it doesn’t (shouldn’t) end here – working out loud can happen anytime, anywhere however, having a dedicated time every year can do a lot for promoting the practice to people and organisations who want to build some more transparent practices into their work […]