Search Results for: Memorial Award

In honor of the colleague, mentor, and friend that brought us together, every year the Internet Time Alliance presents the Jay Cross Memorial Award. The award is for an individual who represents the spirit of continuing informal learning for the workplace. This year, Mark Britz is the deserving recipient.

Jay was a fierce champion of social and informal learning. He saw that most of how we learn to do what we do comes from interacting with others.  As a response to his untimely passing, the remaining members of the ITA decided to honor his memory with an award.  Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings, & myself each year collectively decide an individual who we think best reflects Jay’s vision. And we announce the recipient on the 5th of July, Jay’s birthday.

Mark has resonated and amplified the message of ongoing learning since we first crossed paths. He has interacted with the ITA members regularly via tweets, blogs, and in person when possible.  And we’ve appreciated his engagement with the ideas and his contributions to our thinking.

I got to know Mark’s thinking a bit better when he wrote a case study based upon his work at Systems Made Simple for the Revolution book (Jay wrote the foreword).  And he’s continued to blog about workplace learning at The Simple Shift with short but insightful posts. Currently part of the team running events for the eLearning Guild, Mark manages to consistently touts views that illuminate thinking about the new workplace.

The situation he cites in that case study is exemplary of this type of thinking. Charged with starting a corporate ‘university’ in an organization that was composed of many experts, he knew that ‘courses’ weren’t going to be a viable approach. Instead, he championed and built a social network that pulled these experts together to share voices. The core L&D role was one of facilitating communication and collaboration, rather than presenting information.

For his continuing work promoting communication, collaboration, and continual learning, we recognize Mark’s efforts with the 2018 Internet Time Alliance Jay Cross Memorial Award.

Reposted from the Internet Time Alliance website:

The Internet Time Alliance Jay Cross Memorial Award is presented to a workplace learning professional who has contributed in positive ways to the field of Real Learning and is reflective of Jay‘s lifetime of work. Recipients champion workplace and social learning practices inside their organisation and/or on the wider stage. They share their work in public and often challenge conventional wisdom. The Jay Cross Memorial Award is given to professionals who continuously welcome challenges at the cutting edge of their expertise and are convincing and effective advocates of a humanistic approach to workplace learning and performance.

We are announcing this inaugural award on 5 July, Jay‘s birthday. Following his death in November 2015, the partners of the Internet Time Alliance (Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn) resolved to continue Jay‘s work. Jay Cross was a deep thinker and a man of many talents, never resting on his past accomplishments, and this award is one way to keep pushing our professional fields and industries to find new and better ways to learn and work.

The Internet Time Alliance Jay Cross Memorial Award for 2016 is presented to Helen Blunden. Helen has been an independent practitioner at  Activate Learning  since 2014. Her vision is to help people stay current in a constantly changing world of work and do this by working and sharing their work and learning in a generous, open, and authentic manner. Helen started her career within the Royal Australian Navy across two branches (Training Development and Public Relations) as well as working within Service and external to Service (with Air Force and Army and Defence civilians), then with the Reserves. Helen later worked as a Learning and Development Consultant for Omni Asia Pacific, and subsequently with National Australia Bank as a Social Learning Consultant. Helen is an active blogger and is engaged professionally on various social media platforms.

Here is Helen in her own words:  “In my observations, it‘s not only learning teams in organisations or institutions that need to change and recreate the traditional ways of training into learning experiences. It‘s wider than that. I have smaller businesses, some of whom are vendors who offer training products and services to the public or to organisations who are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to get ‘into the 21st century‘ as their clients ask for more blended programs – shorter programs – but still achieve the same outcomes. Dare I say it, the tools that Jane Hart offers as tools for professional development are not for learning people alone – they‘re for everyone. This is where I‘m grappling to understand the enormity of the change and how, for the first time, you‘re not only helping a client design and develop the learning experience – but you need to teach them how to use the tools so it becomes part of their social behaviour to build their own business, brand and reputation.”

Helen will be formally presented with the award in her home city of Melbourne by Simon Hann, CEO of DeakinPrime, the corporate education arm of Deakin University.

It is with great pleasure that the partners of the Internet Time Alliance present the first Jay Cross Memorial Award to Helen Blunden.

More and more, we’re working from home. This has important implications for organizations figuring out how to make that time productive. What are the best source(s) for remote working expertise? Here’re my recommendations.

I believe that applying the principles of cognitive science to how we think, work, and learn, is a good guide. There is lots known about how people are able to bring their best, alone and together. And, when that intersects with technology, we can find ways to equal, or surpass, existing workplace practices. We already know that many existing practices are contrary to the best outcomes, so this can be an inflection point. And, well, this is where I work and play. And yet, I’m certainly not the only; here are some more resources.

Two of my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance (ITA) have expertise in working effectively. Jane Hart’s modern workplace learning, in particular, has useful guidance. While not specific to remote working, the principles generalize there very well. And Harold Jarche is one of the top thinkers about the intersection of work and learning. Increasingly work  is learning, and his frameworks including Seek-Sense-Share are apt. Particularly when you’re working more alone. Both have worked with organizations to improve outcomes. Charles Jennings does as well, personally, but a lot of his work currently is more on design methodologies and corporate strategy.

I’m also a fan of Mark Britz and his work in thinking through the social aspects of learning (he’s an ITA Jay Cross Memorial Award winner). He looks at how to build a meaningful community within organizations, and that’s a critical part of being able to maintain cohesiveness when you are not together all the time. Jane Bozarth’s work on social, as embodied in her book Show Your Work, is a great guide to some of the core principles to enable more effective working.

Then there’s the whole collection of independents at Change Agents Worldwide. With folks like Simon Terry, Helen Blunden, Marcia Conner, and more, all are folks who collaborate with organizations to work more effectively. (Helen and Marcia are recipients of the ITA Jay Cross Memorial Award as well.) The Change Agents mantra: “We believe the Future of Work will involve: working like a network, organizing like a network, leading like a network, and learning like a network.”

Then there are frameworks that make sense in this era of crisis. I’m a fan of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework talks about how to deal with different states of order. (Harold uses it a lot too.) The Community Maturity Model also can provide guidance about building effective work relationships. I immodestly like our ITA Coherent Organization framework as well.

I’m sure there are more good resources, but these are some ways to think about remote working expertise that I think stand up to scrutiny. I welcome your suggestions.