Corporate learning environments have undergone disruptive changes over the last 20 years due to the explosion of information technology, globalization of the workforce, and shrinking travel and training budgets. Those disruptions are accelerating with the introduction of new technologies such as social media. Potentially the most disruptive change…

Quinn presents a radical new perspective on the interrelationships between education and culture. Rather than viewing education in isolation from major cultural debates, she demonstrates how culture shapes education and education shapes culture. Cultural perspectives and rich empirical data from a wide range of research with learners in…

The key message of NIACE's 2011 survey of adult participation in learning is that recession is bad for lifelong learning for anyone over the age of 25. The survey highlights the central importance of workplaces as sites of adult learning--and the challenges posed to a learning society when opportunities to learn reduce. It shows that the gap…

The concept of tacit knowledge encompasses all of the intricacy of the different experiences that people acquire over time, and which they utilize and bring to bear in carrying out tasks effectively, reacting to unforeseen circumstances, or innovating. The intuitive nature of tacit knowledge, its particular context, and the difficulty of…

Operating a financial investment company in an unstable economy is not easy. But the right training at Vanguard ensures satisfied customers. The company made an investment of its own in learning and development that paid off big in 2009. The learning offerings, both innovative and efficient, keep its workers updated on strategies that bring…

Labor market economists argue that it is difficult to fit occupations into a few skill categories, but most will agree that there are at least three. In this schema, high-skill occupations are those in the professional/technical and managerial categories. Low-skill occupations are in the traditional, in-person service and agricultural categories.…

Given projected increases in workplace diversity, an understanding of diversity's intersection with mentoring is a critical topic in the literature. This article involved an interview with Belle Rose Ragins, one of the world's leading thinkers on diversity and mentoring in the workplace. After providing an overview of Ragins' key achievements and…

Preparing for the future is not what it used to be. Yet, advising students, preparing lessons, and promoting the value of STEM options remains constant. As a result, technical and engineering educators seek clarity about the future of careers, career development, and ways to promote STEM options. Recently, the ITEEA conference allowed the author…

The 21st century workplace is being shaped by ever-changing technological innovations, shifting demographic patterns, globalization and power shifts, in addition to different economic players such as policymakers, employers, education and training institutions that shape the quality of the future workforce. In today's work environment,…

This paper argues that the staffroom is an important professional learning space where beginning teachers interact to understand who they are and the nature of their professional work. The authors highlight the theoretical importance of space and place in the construction and negotiation of beginning teacher subjectivities. To illustrate the…

This article focuses on a blended learning curriculum development project, in which a student was "prospectively" engaged with teacher educators in developing resources designed to increase support for academic reading. Curriculum development took place at the University of Hertfordshire School of Education through the Change Academy for…

E-learning researchers face considerable challenges in creating meaningful and generalizable studies due to the complex nature of this dynamic training medium. Our experience in conducting workplace e-learning research led us to create this guide for planning research on e-learning. We share the unanticipated complications we encountered in our…

The purpose of this article is to present a specific approach to the practice of action research "in complex organisations". Clearly, there are many approaches to the challenge of doing action research in organisations; approaches that are, and also must be, quite context dependent and specific. But my purpose is neither to give an…

This article focuses on the many obstacles that lecturers encounter when learning to use educational technologies in their work, including the inhibitory nature of the larger activity system of the institution and its effect on expansive learning. Data illuminate the theoretical arguments around "learning by expanding"--a notion introduced by Yrjo…

In an attempt to demonstrate the relevance of workplace learning (previously known as "cooperative education") in guiding student and curriculum development, this article presents findings from a research project on the current practice of workplace learning, drawn from an analysis of evaluation reports in a university of technology.…