That's what I'm talking about

I have been thinking about ways to merge many of the functions of corporate learning systems with social networks in organizations.

It appears that Dave Pollard is pondering the same question and in my opinion he has made some very valid points about why social media and web 2.0 has not yet translated into personal learning environments or enterprise 2.0 ubiquity. I particularly like the way he relates the needs of the learner to 3 categories that we use to process information.

The remaining content would be 'collected' in three ways that are analogous to how our brain collects information:

• Using just-in-time canvassing tools to ask people in his/her networks who/what they know (and then use the communication & collaboration tools to collect that information),
• Using just-in-case and just-for-fun RSS syndication tools to collect information that s/he has chosen to subscribe to, and
• Using just-in-time harvesting tools to automatically collect information on new topics that s/he has decided s/he needs to know more about, in an 'inbox' in his/her preferred format, so it can be sorted, browsed, read and disposed of at his/her leisure

He has done a nice job of depicting some of the challenges of making a personal learning environment work in an enterprise setting. He also states that changes need to be made to functionality within social networks to improve their use for all learners.

I tend to believe that learning management systems (LMS) need to adapt to be more like social networks while incorporating the ability to use RSS and search to accommodate both the needs of the learner and the organization.

Some vendors are working in this direction but efforts that I have seen are slow and very incremental in development. Is there something better out there? Let me know if you find it.