Happy new year one and all. Here's to 51 more bouts of rambling nonsense from the TrainingZone editor. Which isn't what my blogs are meant to be like, but the beauty of the form is that you do get to digress, interrupt yourself - if you like - and generally wriggle free of the editorial straitjacket. Editorial pieces serve their purpose very well but the freedom of a blog, is, I think essential to the dynamism of a digital community. As is a YouTube channel; funny I should mention that because TrainingZone has just given its channel a makeover, and, bar a few ongoing tweaks is ready to be searched, viewed, liked and commented on. So fire away, it's all right here.
A cursory mention must go to our mobile site which is gathering pace as the volume and diversity of smartphones and tablets continues apace. So if you're reading this blog on the move, check out the mobile version here. If you're on an iPad you can probably handle the full version, so keep doing what you're doing.
Theme-wise, January will be covering learning technologies, and February will focus more specifically on mobile learning and March on coaching/mentoring, so if you have something to say, a particular opinion or an area of expertise that the community could benefit from hearing about, please get in touch.
Predictions for the year? aside from the usual flying cars and teleportation malarkey (they never come true do they?), uncontroversially I'm going to plump for the continuing popularity of the iPad, which in turn will promote the idea of remote working and remote learning. Which in turn means that the line between work time and leisure time will further blur for many people. There will be a continued focus on creating more lean, efficient organisations, which means widening skillsets for existing staff. And what do we think the impacts of that are going to be? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. There will be continuing controversy around university fees, putting a focus more on apprenticeships. But then perhaps this was the coalition's plan all along, to price out higher education and promote work experience, providing industry with cut-price labour through apprenticeships while at the same time alleviating the debt racked up by the previous administration?
So, that's my first blog of the year. Easier on the brevity than the end of year reviews, and with significantly less poetry.
2 Responses
Acting editor’s blog
"There will be continuing controversy around university fees, putting a focus more on apprenticeships. But then perhaps this was the coalition’s plan all along, to price out higher education and promote work experience, providing industry with cut-price labour through apprenticeships while at the same time alleviating the debt racked up by the previous administration?"
Really, one can’t let this comment go un-commented upon! One trusts you don’t purport to speak for all of TrainingZone when you refer to the debt racked up by the previous administration, as many don’t believe the debt is the previous administration’s fault. Or were you being ironic here, putting words in the coalition’s mouth when you don’t support the coalition?
At any rate, providing industry with cut-price labour through employing on the cheap the many who will now fall out of the universities’ net sounds like a perfect recipe for perpetuation of the class-ridden Britain of the 19th and early 20th Centuries – very retrograde indeed. People have rights; they shouldn’t be fodder for industrialists.
liddlebiddapolitics
Hi there, thanks for the comment.
Irony or not, I phrased it in a way that I hoped would sufficiently disguise my own political leanings, hence the ‘perhaps’ at the outset – made it a bit wishy-washy in delivery though I guess. I don’t think I’ll expand upon it any further than that otherwise I’ll dig myself into more of a hole, but any pondering over these issues is of course my own conjecture and not TrainingZone’s. At TrainingZone we report government strategy stories with as little bias as possible, and try to cover salient political issues and policies that effect L&D from a variety of angles, but this being a blog post rather than a piece of editorial content I thought I’d pose a question deliberately designed to court controversy and foster debate.
I didn’t mean to offend, and I completely agree with an egalitarian, class-less approach to education and workforce recruitment, for what it’s worth.
cheers!
Jon