You might want to clear your schedule for an hour on 22nd November 8AM (Pacific Time) to attend this one! Amit Garg and Mridula R will conduct a webinar on how to leverage mobility more effectively. The session will look at several critical aspects like what the considerations should be for choosing such a solution in the first place; to what spectrum of technologies exist. It’s a packed one hour plus several helpful resources as takeaways from the session and opportunities for lively discussion. Talk about a heavy breakfast!

How does teaching change for the times when business is suddenly more challenging, when learners are under pressure to performance at higher levels? What kind of needs come up? What kind of teaching would have long-term impact on business performance? And how can you better leverage mobility to help with such a program’s design? Worth exploring, isn’t it...

Training magazine provided this interesting information in the Training Industry Report 2016:

On an average, employees were given 43.8 hours of training in 2016. The most under-trained employees were from large (i.e. 10,000 or more employees) organisations – they received only 33 hours of training, well under the average and quite significantly less than medium or small organisation employees.

Draw from that what conclusions you will!

"Information overload is a problem of the times […]The sheer physical bulk of scientific and technical publications appearing in the United States has doubled approximately every 20 years since 1800".

That was written about information overloads by psychologist and behavioural scientist James Miller… in the early1960s! You have to wonder for how long we will leave a problem like this unsolved and more or less untackled! Isn’t it time we thought of better responses to handle information overload than 'let's see if we can avoid it'?

Is there one 'correct' way to overcome passivity in the way we think? Is there even 'the' way? Of course not! But here are some handy suggestions, breaking things down to day-to-day actions you can consider taking.

Spending your entire day in front of a computer screen is not the same as spending it watching TV. With a TV, you don’t need to seek — content is pushed to you. With the Internet, you have a much wider variety to choose from but you’ve got to pull it to you. That really helps with the overcoming passivity thing. How?

Experiment! So you like music? Listen to more genres, explore sub genres. Read even a simple blog or two about that particular kind of music and then listen to it side by side to consciously experience it differently. Find out what other people are up to, the schools of thought that exist around the things that interest you.

What falls by the wayside in constant content push media is the cycle after the initial exposure to the content (i.e., after reading/listening). Did that plot really make sense? Was the documentary really interesting? Why? Was it good, was it bad, was it controversial, what statistics are around it or what issues and social conventions prevail?

One day suddenly we get worked up about no longer playing music or writing, and swing out in wild reaction: start a blog or commit to practising every day for 4 hours! Unsurprisingly, that's hard to sustain. How about consciously phasing the change? How about exploring a spectrum of activity? Active-passive aren't binary ways.

It’s still possible to be utterly unimaginative and fall into a rut on the net. After all, the net gives you what you ask for, right? It really helps to figure out where there is good variety. Special interest forums can be really diverse within your interest area, and before you zoom in on an interest area (if you're still figuring out what that is), try the generally famous-for-variety places like the TED or BBC portals – they've carefully curated and abundant high quality content on various topics, so you can sample lots in a single place without having to spend an hour just searching!

And with these baby steps, sustained over a period of time, you're well on your way to being more intellectually engaged with everything you encounter. We'll be doing a more detailed blog on this soon, so keep your eyes open!

And that brings us to the end of this edition of the Buzz. Do feel free to spread the goodness! – You can also follow us on: