Search - what you probably never knew about Searching, but should

I was reading Tony Karrer's blog the other day. He had written a post on using Search and ways to improve your search techniques. In this post he shared some of his tips on how to use search, especially those times that you need information and need more than what Google can provide. It was part of his Tool Set series, which includes several other great posts, but I found this post to be the most helpful to me out of all of them.

In it he discusses what you can find with Google, and why you might need to use other search engines based on what you're looking for. I won't spoil it for you as he does a much better job of writing about it than I could on rehashing what he said. However, what I will say is that if you only use one search engine (probably Google), that's fine for most searches, but you should get more skilled at using Google and consider using other search engines as well. For a great listing of alternative search engines, check out the Digital Research Tools Wiki, specifically, the Data Visualization and Visual Search Tools pages. There are a lot of other resources listed here as well, so worth checking out.

I have some learning to do now, because I, like most people, am generally a pretty lazy internet search user and could use more practice on how to be more efficient and effective when I do a search.

Notes from DevLearn08: eLearning Research Panel

Here are my notes from a very interesting discussion on where eLearning is going based on the perspectives of some researchers in the field. It was a really engaging talk, so my notes are a bit sparse as far as being pretty English, but I think you will get the general idea of the discussions and where they went. I have included links to each researcher's profile on their business sites in case you are interested in finding out more about them.

Panel:
Kevin Oakes - does lots of research for ASTD
Claire Schooley - Forrester, information and knowledge mgmt group, came from academia, most clients are corporate, proprietary research requested by corps
Chris Howard - qualitative/quantitative research on measurable best practices for corps
Kevin Martin - human capital mgmt group, primary research that's end-user driven, talent mgmt, metrics to show value of trng/talent programs

Moderator: Will Thalheimer (with Guild Research)

Types of Research: Product/Service review research; basic research (academic); applied research (academic); research to practice research; industry research

Top Trends:
Learning 2.0 (theme of conference) is also going to have biggest impact on corp training

• collaborative
• learner in charge
• innate with younger generation
• chaotic
  

Talent Management (best practices)

• integrate learning with recruitment
• learning with development/career paths and corp objectives
• more organized and methodical - need to balance 2.0 with talent management (chaos and organization)
• learning can get left behind in talent management as groups focus on performance mgmt
• very few companies have integrated talent management right now, so will be up-and-coming in the future

Learning 2.0

• Trust/culture is biggest barrier to using 2.0 tools
• Can use grassroots to prove concept and build business case but need to get some help from top to get real change made
• GE and Qualcomm are strong 2.0 cultures

Economy - good or bad for industry?

• Data suggest it's bad, budgets are down significantly
• Link yourself to business challenges - best thing you can do
  
• Look into using more video conferencing for training/meetings that people would have traveled to before
• especially hi-def telepresence types
• be sure to show % savings on travel, green practices
• Crisis forced companies to put resources into training, L&D
• criticality of retaining key workers and getting them to be more productive
• brings L&D into focus, makes them more accountable
• learning more important in tight economic times
• L&D usually takes big hit in down times
• show ties to business results to stay viable

Talent Management - where's it going? Learning taking a back seat?

• performance should increase to quarterly informal reviews to integrate with learning (best in class already do this)
  
• where are gaps? use learning to fill quickly
  
• benefits are hard to measure, sometimes anecdotal, but are real
• increases visibility of learning
• have to break down silos of traditional HR groups, make groups work together to see benefits of integration
• chasm between what hiring managers need and what HR thinks they need

Measuring Learning - top priority?

• measure in ways that board understands
• profitability
• revenue
• meeting business needs
  
• not necessarily Kirkpatrick levels
• generally not a top priority, even though they say it is
• The Training Measurement Book, Josh Bersin

Q&A

• Interview top performers to get knowledge that can then be disseminated to rest of staff. This is best way to get informal knowledge out to everyone.
• Understand financial drivers of business to be able to correlate learning to business.
• Ask them what the business "pains" are and then develop training to address those "pains"
• Hybrid between centralized/decentralized learning departments is what best practice companies are finding works best