The Burden of Training
The paradox of the knowledge age: you need to constantly upgrade your skills but you don't have time for it. Whenever the boss or the HR department says it's time to go to a training, most people wince. We understand your problem. After all, training takes time away from work. When you get back to the office, the pile of work has grown and you will hardly retain what you picked up from the week-long training.
Training without Training
What if you could be trained without you feeling burdened? This is the problem that we are trying to solve with today's ICT tools (web, email, SMS, Twitter, etc). What if you could undergo continuous learning without feeling the burden of the usual training?
If we accept this challenge, we can work out ways to achieve it. Let's say we have a 7-day training session. We can spread this 7-day session into a month. Instead of sitting in a classroom, listening to usually boring lectures, we can break up the content into micro-lessons. A micro-lesson could be emailed, texted, MMS'd, IM'd, twittered and RSS-fed to you.
That way, instead of using your spare time for chatting, surfing, or reading unofficial email, you can still chat, surf and read your microlessons. Since they are in bite-sized chunks, going through a micro-lesson is not daunting.
Micro-lessons: Bite-Sized Chunks
Let's use an example. Our ideal employee Abe writes in his personal page in the company intranet that he is interested in viral marketing. The intranet/elearning app of his company remembers this and starts trawling the web for related articles. The "agent" of the elearning app then gets the first paragraph of websites, pulls definitions and related keywords from Google or Dictionary.com and starts to "chunk" these into portions that can be sent via SMS (good for pushing thoughts of the day and definitions), email (good for 3-4 paragraphs with links to full articles) and IM (same as SMS).
This is the general notion of TwT or training without Training. We'll be blogging more about this as we move along, and a part of our R&D efforts will focus on this.
