Tag Archives: Jane Bozarth
I Don’t Care What You Had For Lunch: Finding Professional Value in Twitter

I Don’t Care What You Had For Lunch: Finding Professional Value in Twitter

by on July 5, 2011 in Social Media

Here at Dashe & Thomson, we made a New Year’s resolution for 2011 to dig a little deeper into social media and explore how to use it for social and informal learning, increasing website traffic, and building networks. Of course, Twitter was on the list of tools we were nudged to start using on a regular basis.

I have to say, I met this announcement with an inward groan. In my mind, at the time, I considered Twitter to be for celebrities to keep fans up to date with their most recent apologies (who cares?) and other sad folks who felt the need to broadcast their lunch menu to the world (double who cares?). Not for me, I thought. I am generally an introvert and not prone to fits of opinion sharing without being asked. I was NOT excited about this.

On the other hand, I was willing to give it a …

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Re-evaluating Evaluation

Re-evaluating Evaluation

by on March 16, 2011 in Evaluation

For years, I have dutifully included a description of Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Learning Evaluation in every proposal for every company I have worked with.  And every company has agreed to use “Level 1: Reaction,” or―as it has come to be known—the “Smile Sheet.”  Some companies will use “Level 2: Learning” to measure whether the learners have mastered the training course content.  Hardly ever do they use “Level 3:  Behavior,” and they never use “Level 4: Results.”

I have found this to be extremely frustrating.  And as time has gone by, I have started to wonder about the validity of Kirkpatrick in today’s world.  The focus is on the training event itself and the follow-up to that event.  What is measured doesn’t seem to be what companies are interested in.  Company executives are typically interested in the bottom line, not how well their employees apply the learning from a training …

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Twitter as Social Learning: Seven Ways to Facilitate the Exchange of Information

Twitter as Social Learning: Seven Ways to Facilitate the Exchange of Information

by on March 14, 2011 in social learning

Most of us in the adult learning industry have already found and incorporated Twitter into our everyday lives.  Where Facebook and LinkedIn serve mainly as social dashboards for our personal and professional networks, respectively, I see Twitter as a customized information portal.  For those of you that use web-based aggregators like Google Reader but have not yet made room for Tweets, Twitter is an aggregator on steroids.  Instead of waiting for your favorite journalist to write a thousand-word essay on Charlie Sheen’s shenanigans from the day before, you can hear directly from Mr. Sheen himself, the second he wants to speak.

Twitter gets a bad rap.  From its childish name to its complex language of re-tweets and hashtags, many people tend to criticize the application before they try it.  Since I became an active Twitter user a few months ago, the application has grown on me to the point …

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