Learning for work via podcasting on my free time?

I think the Podcasting group chose two very interesting pieces of work to share with us this week. First the video of Larry Lessig discussing reviving our creative culture, and the article The Changing Face of Workplace Learning by Anders Gronstedt. Both were informative but I have to admit I did enjoy one way more than the other.

The video of Larry Lessig unfortunately left me wondering if I had watched the right video and I kept checking my link to make sure I had the right one. Although engaging and thought provoking, I did not see the relevance to podcasting. He made valid points about reviving the creative culture by giving free access to content so young people could learn from it and use it for further creative flow. He gave two entertaining examples of video clips remixed with popular songs. He further explains that the culture and times in which our youth are growing up in, mixing songs and their belief that they are entitled to use them for creative expression at their leisure, is all they know.

The learning piece I really enjoyed was the article The Changing Face of Workplace Learning. It opened my eyes to the possibilities of facilitating training using podcasting in several areas of my company. I extracted two key points from this reading: The trend to host voting for favorite podcasts and the self-filtering of relevant information directly supports the note the article concluded with: "In the old world we could only evaluate ourselves months later by inferring how our performance affected company results. Now we know right away and lessons learned can be put into play immediately." Those are music to a marketer's ears! Even if it is an internal concept, immediate results of what's effective in training can help guide future trainings and save a company tens of thousands of dollars.

Another key concept is the mobility of podcasting. Although it's key for employees to maximize their time while on the job, I am not sold on the idea of employees using their own down time to cram in more training. Driving to a sales meetings to meet with clients, yes, good use of work time, but listening to a podcast while on the treadmill after work, NO! At some point there has to be a personal life to counteract the work life. We have become a society where people are defined by what they do. We find professional people more valuable than blue collar workers. Many professionals are so consumed with their jobs that their lives revolve around them and when something goes wrong even if its out of their control they take it so personally they take their own life because of overwhelming grief.

Food for thought:

If the creators of music, art, theater, etc made their content free for the everyday consumer, how would they make their living?

If employees spend their down time learning via podcasting when do they recharge their batteries?

Lastly, I found the Workplace Learning piece enlightening for my paper because I see the potential for pocasting to be utilized more in classroom teaching. The digital generational gap could prove challenging for educators to grasp the concept of using this technology. Some of the principles of this article could directly tie into or give example to why it's important to bridge the digital generation gap.