No more lonely coffee breaks

There’s a new casual networking venture for microbusiness owners, the self-employed and those working from home in the Sherborne, Dorset, area: weekly morning coffee breaks.

The idea was conceived by Nancy Weitz, owner of Architela, an online learning and internet strategy business. “I’ve been working from my home office for 8 years,” she says, “and though I spend a lot of time interacting with people online and by telephone, I’ve been a bit envious of those in traditional workplaces, who have frequent conversations with colleagues around the coffee machine or water cooler. It’s the one big drawback of home-based or independent working.”

So she approached Cordelia McFarlane of the Sherborne Chamber of Trade and Commerce to help set up just such an opportunity. “Those of us with very small businesses have a lot in common and could really benefit from networking on a regular basis, where there are no demands, no expectations and no sales pitches – just good coffee and friendly conversation.”

Tuesdays, 10:30-11:30am, The Three Wishes, Cheap Street, Sherborne.

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One of the key mistakes organisations make in starting down the road to online learning and training is to overvalue the technology and undervalue the role of learning design, leading to the question: does the technology serve the learning or master it?

We may be winning the battle against the luddites, and slowly enticing the technology-timid to change with the times, but are we really doing this right?

It’s worth asking yourself a few questions, before getting out the purchase order:

Why do you need an all-singing all-dancing learning management system (LMS)? What are you going to do with all those features? How do they enable, enhance, support the learning?

What is it you actually want to achieve with your learning programme? What are the best approaches, methods, tools to meet those expectations?  Is it possible that a smorgasmord of “old” or relatively bland technologies might do the job better?

Who is leading the project? Is it technology-led? Or is there a true collaboration between stakeholders?

Keep up on trends by all means, and try out the ones that seem to have promise, but remain flexible and adaptable and don’t have your head turned by every shiny new gadget that crosses your path.

And, above all, make sure you start the planning with expertise in learning design and strategy, before you purchase a big, expensive white elephant that looks pretty but doesn’t actually fit your needs.

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