Dia de Muertos en Mexico

Training in Mexico is off to great start. The students are respectful, warm, and eager to learn. Upon introduction many of them express a general state of happiness associated with this celebratory time of year. Walking the streets and squares i notice a sense of calm and peace that is strangely paired with skulls and gory symbols of death. Mexico's day of the dead is a deeply rooted tradition traced back to the Aztecs and other cultures of the Mexican highlands who believe that the spirits of the dead live in Mictlan. (a place of peace built by the gods). Once a year however they peacefully return to earth to visit loved ones. The traditional calender marks two dates for the souls to visit earth. Nov 1, is dedicated to the dead children and Nov 2 is reserved for the return of the departed adults. This celebration is one of great joy as it is an opportunity to experience a celebration with loved ones who have passed. The festival peaks with preparations of offerings and alters dedicated to the deceased of each family. The offerings can include intricately cut paper, drawings, photographs, items belonging to the deceased, favorite meals prepared, lights, candles, incense, flowers etc. Families take great pride in their offerings and many become beautiful works of art. These celebrations generally take place in public squares and cemeteries but many families open their homes to showcase their alters to the public. I'll definitely be a part of this humble celebration and I'm hoping to reconnect with some old friends along the way.

Mexico Monday!

Next stop Mexico City. Although it has taken some turns for the worse in recent years most indicators suggest that much of the violent crime is drug related  and concentrated in the boarder towns. That said M City is one of the safer places to visit in Mexico which makes it a prime location for call centers. This travel if nothing else will provide me with some great opportunities to fine tune this curriculum, and hopefully change a few lives. I'd  like to gather a few big picture nuggets on the state of  Social Media as well. I'm curious to see how well my social learning approaches will translate and I wonder how large of a stake social media plays in a city as large as Mexico. 

Thoughts from Kentucky

As we push full steam ahead towards 2012 I find myself in small town Kentucky. Even here it is becoming increasingly important to consider the significant impact Social Media & Social Learning may have on relationships, jobs, and perhaps the evolution of man (yes I said it). One can easily recognize that as we Twitter about and become more connected, plugged in, updated, poked and tweeted with increased technological synergies the pace at which we operate is only increasing. So what does all this mean?  It means that we are finally on the brink of a great shift.

It has been said that Social Learning is how the majority of actual learning takes place. The suggestion here is that our structured classes are successful because in one way or another they provide an atmosphere or increase the opportunities for collaboration. Following this logic then, we must develop most of our own skills on the job similarly through collaboration and Social Learning. (I didn’t think I was getting anything out of all that reading)

Jobs:  We can see that the questions we will be asking ourselves are, if our classrooms and work places become more social to foster greater learning what then will be the metrics to measure real time success? Can we wait for after the fact on job performance to address gaps in new training models?  I think so, but corporate America doesn’t seem to be down with this new approach.

Workers:  The trend we are observing is that mechanized work continues to be replaced by automation and skilled labor continues to be outsourced. The work that is of most value in this new age is that of a creative nature. Employees that can conceptualize and communicate outside the box concepts and ideas will be valued for their skills. Leadership success is quickly becoming a measure of how well or how often a leader can identify valuable innovation and creativity and develop it by connecting technical task gurus with the innovator resulting in a profit form.

Relationships:  With this technological Tsunami comes an ever increasing transparency. It is this transparency that will allow us to engage our world as one cohesive unit. Without transparency companies are finding it increasingly difficult to control large organizations in a timely manner.  Large ships cannot handle quick, sharp turns and are unable to move at the speed the new market demands.

Evolution: The next evolutionary step of man is one that will begin with simultaneous conscious decisions made by all. It is social media & social learning that will allow us to anticipate and experience this shift as one cohesive unit much in the same way as a school of fish responds to their environment by moving in the same direction at precisely the same moment. It is not e.s.p. the fish respond to.  It is the level of open transparency in which they live that allows them to engage simultaneously and respond to their environmental conditions in unison, and in a way that benefits the entire school as opposed to the individual. This type of shared response is what will deliver man into the new age.

I’m hoping we can achieve this level of transparency, are there signs that this shift has begun? If so what are they?