Learning / Education

Are you ready for a different kind of learning?

Are you ready for a different kind of learning?

There is a great story from Don Tapscott in which he recounts taking his 12-year-old daughter to Colonial Williamsburg to experience the wonderful recreation of life in America in the 1700s. The town is an accurate portrayal of life at that time, with living recreations and demonstrations of every aspect of colonial life. As they went from exhibit to exhibit, Don recounted that his daughter was full of wonder as she did not recognize most of the activities, tools and settings, like the brickmaker stomping straw and mud, or the outdoor kitchen with the open fire, or the blacksmith making tools. You get the idea. Then she walked into the schoolhouse and saw the desks and chalkboards and enthusiastically tells her father, "Daddy, I know what this is. It is a school."

Think about that for a minute. What modern-day activity do you know of that has not changed much in 300 years?

At BLI, we think learning has to change to keep up with the pace of exponential change. In fact, we think it is the most important competitive advantage there is. In a period of rapid change and increasing complexity, the winners will be those who can keep their rate of learning greater than the rate of change and greater than their competition, or L>C2. That is why we have been working on new and improved ways to deliver learning that matters. Here are five ways we are changing up learning:

  1. Social: We have been using Twitter hashtags for several years to supplement learning at conferences (before that it, was Second Life and CPA Island). We are now exploring some more formal ways of capturing and documenting this learning.
  2. Mobile / nano, or "Just When You Need It” learning: Our State Board officially approved 10-minute CPE last year and is moving for official regulation expected in March 2015. We are working on a innovative learning platform using Twitter that will track nano or micro learning from Twitter and LinkedIn.
  3. Cloud: In what we call the four Cs of talent development, the AICPA Navigator allows us to offer Competencies, Career Path, and a Curriculum on a Cloud-based learning platform that allows firms and companies to move their talent development to a strategic and systematic approach.
  4. Collaborative: MBSN (Management By Sticky Notes), Conferences.io, and the ThinkTank Collaboration platform are highly engaging ways of increasing learning through involvement (see our post on LinkedIn).
  5. Competency-based learning: With our Bounce framework (which maps BLI programs to the new CGMA Competency framework) and our new program to develop a special self-directed action learning program to build a competency around anticipation and strategic thinking with internationally recognized futurist Dan Burrus, we have always believed in a competency-based approach to learning. In fact, it is where BLI came from – the initial research in 1998 from the AICPA Vision Project that identified the top five competencies for CPAs in the future.

Are you ready for a different kind of learning?

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Tom Hood