GI culture

GI culture
Our challenge as learning & development professionals is to adapt to the GI (google it) culture. I think that accessibility and availability are paramount: i.e. making the best information available (and being identified as such) and making this information as accessible as possible. The 'Key Points Guides' probably provide the best examples to date. A shift in focus from courses and instructional design to tools and referenceware.

Many years ago I met with a learning 'guru' at Motorola. At the time he believed that the future of learning would be learning 'agents' - software that roamed the network, bringing relevant learning to your doorstep and all the while building a profile of your requirements.
Is this wrong? If not, why not draw the same conclusion for an on-demand world: content selected for us and downloaded to our device by an automated 'helper'? I don't think so. The nub of the argument must be that the automated system will always lag behind the decision-making process employed by users; sophisticated, contextualised decisions lie at the heart of their experience.

We expect Google to filter out irrelevant links, we like to be able to select favourite channels - but when all is said and done we like to make the choices ourselves, or to feel that we are making them within a finite and differentiated range of options: I want to select from 200 links, not 2,000,000.