Friday, April 20, 2007

My HBS Presentation - Web 2.0 Implications on Learning

I've somewhat fallen off the map on this blog. Been traveling and consulting with a bunch of early-stage and growth companies. Really fun stuff these days.

One of my recent fun experiences was doing a presentation at Harvard Business School (HBS) on the implications of Web 2.0 type tools (Blogs, Wikis, Social Bookmarking, RSS, RSS Readers) on corporate learning and someone like HBS.

In the corporate space, these tools have quite an implication in that most training organizations get displaced for knowledge transfer as content gets created by end-users/learners instead of by the training organization. My expectation is that the classic corporate training organization is going to be a slow downward path retaining compliance training and developmental activities - but these will become smaller and smaller part of how employees learn (as compared to informal learning).

For HBS, the issues really are quite different as they want to continue to be a "transformative experience" ... a truly developmental kind of experience. At the same time, graduates from HBS need to be armed with how to operate in a virtual work-team world who use the tools as a means of sharing knowledge and collaborating. Further, as HBS looks towards providing on-going value to students, these kinds of tools become significantly more important. It's not that we'll see radical changes from HBS, but certainly adoption within the core and as part of add-on services is highly likely.