Mark Salisbury

Mark Salisbury’s book, iLearning: How to Create an Innovative Learning Organization, shows how to represent organizational knowledge by identifying the underlying performance objectives of knowledge work.  Using performance objectives to manage their knowledge, organizations can embed training, best practices, and expert advice in their collaborative work processes.  They can also use this detailed knowledge to improve their processes. However, the biggest impact for organizations that embrace iLearning is that they know what they know when they are facing new challenges.  This existing knowledge becomes their most powerful fuel for innovation.  After reading this book, members of organizations will be able to bring the following benefits to their companies, agencies, nonprofit organizations, and institutions:

• Managers of knowledge workers will be able to facilitate collaborative work with innovative learning, lead interventions to enable iLearning, and strategically plan for the future.

• Training professionals will have the skills to facilitate collaborative work with innovative learning and to apply the methodologies for achieving that learning.

• Human resource professionals will be able to develop interventions to facilitate iLearning and be able to plan workforce development.

• Information technology specialists will be able to apply methodologies and deploy technologies to support iLearning in organizations.

Why is this topic important?

 

Most organizations don’t know what they know when it comes to improving their performance.  The traditional way of sending workers “away” to a training session to learn what they need to know does not help organizations build on what they know.  Even having workers “go away” to a distance education course that is launched from their workstation takes them too far away from the learning that is needed for their immediate work.  It’s becoming apparent that learning must be part of work — and that it must take place in collaboration with others as teams solve problems together.  iLearning is a means for organizations to facilitate this innovative learning in a purposeful manner.  Once instituted, iLearning becomes an organizational strategy for innovation.

How is iLearning organized?

 

iLearning leads readers through the necessary changes needed to become an innovative learning organization. This journey unfolds through five main themes presented in the five parts of this book.  Part One describes how to facilitate collaborative work in an organization.  Part Two describes how to facilitate collaborative work with innovative learning. Part Three describes the organizational interventions for creating an iLearning organization.  Part Four describes how to apply the methodologies and technologies that support an iLearning organization.  And Part Five tells why and how iLearning is changing our world, particularly our K–12 schooling, higher education, and global economy. iLearning has been written with a busy audience in mind — managers of knowledge workers, training and human resource professionals, and information technology specialists.  Chapters are short and use many illustrations to provide quick and easy access to concepts and to put readers in command of the details needed to implement those concepts.  Entertaining, and true, real-life examples in the “expert advice” section of each chapter (derived from Mark's radio show, The Knowledge Worker) help readers engage with both concepts and methods.