Jay Cross is at it once again. He’s launched the Real Learning Project, an exploration of DIY learning in today’s organizational environment. Here’s his description of the effort:
The Real Learning Project helps people who are taking their professional development into their own hands and shows them how to learn to learn.
My new book, Real Learning is for all those people we’ve made responsible for their own learning. This is the missing manual.
Real Learning explains self-assessment, setting goals, dealing with feeds and flows, improving retention, curation, working out loud, social learning, and more. Each technique is backed with a practical exercise.
Real Learning reveals how to:
• Learn from experience
• Take advantage of the latest findings from neuroscience
• Save time by accelerating how you learn
• Remember things faster, better, deeper
• Adopt sound learning practices as lifelong habits
• Form a sustainable, nurturing community
• Use shortcuts, cheatsheets, and rules of thumb
Real Learning is about how to learn for yourself. No classrooms. No instructors. No training department. Little in the way of theory. Just stuff that works. (Although learning with your team is encouraged,)
The core focus is experiential learning and tacit knowledge. It’s learning to be all you can be rather than amassing more content.
This matters for two reasons. One, DIY learning is something we are all going to have to get better at. Organizations won’t have the time or the resources to invest in time-consuming formal training efforts. But the need to learn new things will only continue to increase. Two, Jay is one of the key people thinking about this problem in organizational contexts.
There are a number of resources to take advantage of with this effort:
• A blog that Jay describes as a Plog—A personal progress blog
I’ve purchased the e-book version of the book in its present beta form and hope to follow along and contribute as it evolves.