Did you ever build paper aeroplanes and throw them in class or lectures? I did. We tried to get them to fly into the big bowl-shaped light fittings on the high ceiling in the main lecture hall. I only ever succeeded once. What do you remember doing that was fun, and perhaps a little
Well over six years ago, a friend asked me what to pay attention to in her new more senior role in Learning and Development. She had already spent some time in HR and L&D, so what she was really asking was what was new, what were people not doing that they should be doing, and
This article on informal learning and learning transfer was written for and originally published on https://www.trainingzone.co.uk/deliver/training/informal-learning-critically-important-but-neglected and has been published here with TrainingZone's permisson. Informal learning is a big thing now in learning and development. The 70:20:10 model, and others, tells us that informal learning is vastly more important than you’d ever think given the
Can you really multitask efficiently? There are many people who swear that they can, and just as many studies that say they are fooling themselves, and that efficient multitasking is impossible. So what is the truth of it? First, we need to take a look at what we mean by “multitasking.” The idea arose in the
Learning & Development – An evolution or revolution? In a recent poll the Learning and Performance Institute (LPI) posed this question and the result was unequivocally undecided with the following result: Evolution – 50% Revolution – 50% In this article Paul Matthews shares his thoughts in relation to the question: Neither and both. It reminds me of the old
I am saddened to hear of the passing of Jay Cross, a leading thinker in the Learning & Development world. Of course, he was so much more than that. If you followed his blogs he was interested in so many other things and always seemed willing to experiment and learn. Although I never met him,
Your organisation, or the client you are working for, does not care about learning. There, I’ve said it! But why would an organisation pay for something they don’t care about? While those of you who earn your living getting paid to provide learning services laugh at what is obviously a dumb statement, let’s explore why
I was asked to contribute to a super little booklet by our associates at Reed Learning: "The Little Book of Inspiration" contains inspiration from "pioneering thinkers from the Learning & Development world". I was really chuffed that they considered me a pioneering thinker, and also to be published alongside people who I have looked
From all of us here at People Alchemy, we wish you a most enjoyable and relaxing Christmas and New Year. And then what happens? 2014 happens. Are you ready? William Gibson said "The future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed." How does this apply to you? What trends are starting that
Paul Matthews shares impressions from his tour to the rain forests of Indonesian Borneo with the Orangutan Foundation a few years ago: I was lucky. The rains had been light this season and the swamp was only up to my knees, not my waist. This meant the leeches couldn’t get to places I would rather they didn’t
Just in time for the summer holidays Amazon are running a special free Kindle promotion for Informal Learning at Work: How to Boost Performance in Tough Times from 10-14 July Dr Peter Honey summarised it well in his review. “I smiled my way through Paul Matthews’ book and I very much hope it will have
You have probably already read about Google Reader being switched off on Sunday 30th June, so if you use it for your RSS feeds and have already made alternative arrangements, you can ignore this. If you receive my weekly management tips via RSS using Google Reader you will loose the feed together with all your
I have been fascinated by the number of articles and blog posts I see which seem to equate social learning with social media. There are many who seem to think that social learning didn’t exist before Twitter. Of course it did. It has been a predominant form of learning for the human species since we
I read a rather provocative blog post the other day titled “get rid of job descriptions and you’ll hire better people”. Lou Adler, who wrote the blog, advocates a performance profile rather than a job/candidate description. For him a performance profile is a description of the work that a person needs to successfully accomplish in
The term learnscape was coined during the 1970s to denote areas set aside in schools where pupils could interact with the environment and learn from that interaction. It could have been a special plot in the grounds where they planted seeds, a frog pond to observe the frog’s life cycle, or an ant farm in