Who you going to call? Or text? Or Google?

If your first response was “Ghostbusters” I understand however according to a Pew Internet study 88% of adults have cell phones with ~half of them being smart phones.  So odds are pretty good you aren’t calling anyone however you may be tuning into the resources you have collected that you feel are important to you.  These resources may be web sites, bloggers, discussion groups, perhaps even your own “sent” or “tweet’ed” messages.  This reminded me of a quote by Jeff Jarvis who wrote, “So you do what you do best.  And link to the rest”.  If this sounds familiar then you are utilizing what Harold Jarche refers to as a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system.

I wrote about our personal learning networks (#LearningPersonally) earlier and must admit a high degree of comfort in Jarche’s  model.  This reminds me of Blooms taxonomy original and new domains with the concept of sharing being one based upon synthesis, analysis, and creation of content.  Key to all of this is the critical thinking component and being able to filter selectively and customize the content you need when you need it.  From that point you are going through the process of making sense out of all of this information.

So why is this important?  Sharing is good, right?  Absolutely, however the focus of helping my business grow and employees succeed involves more than simply sharing; we need to curate content to place information into context and help our community make sense of it all.  Robin Good said that “curation is about making sense of a topic/issue/event /person/product etc. for a specific audience” and here is where our instructional and design skills can be maximized.  We should be working with the content generators to create ways for our learning community to “see” different ways to solve the problem be it text, graphic, video, or a mix of all.  When I wrote that I am a content strategist my intent is to help organize and become an info-hub, the first place to go to when their need is now.  Bob Mosher wrote recently that “business will only be as successful as its learners’ ability to sustain, innovate and continuously improve their performance.”

This is where it all comes together.  Curating content generated by subject matter experts, industry peers, and specialists, while ensuring delivery systems are maximized and metrics are tracked allows us to be the partner we want to be with our operational colleagues.  With the numbers growing of the small tools in our users hands we should be creating a strategy that focuses on their need and desire for access.  To add value to the organization we need to actively partner with our operational leads and their subject matter experts to collaborate on creating short learning solutions, instructionally we can add more value in developing testing components that subject matter and together we can create our evolution to workplace performance support.  We should be focused on strengthening the user’s core critical skills and providing them the links to the resources they need rather than overload them with content and relying on memory.  We can create success if we enable the user “to adapt to the changes they face every day and to realign past learning to produce a more innovative and improved outcome”.