While your training session is going on, one of your employees is busy sending tweets on some issue she needs solutions for. Another employee is switching tabs from your online course to his Facebook page where he is actively following a discussion on a real-life, work-related problem. With employees being increasingly expected to hit the ground running, they have to come up with interim solutions to their learning needs, even as they wait for suitable formal training solutions.

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My response is a bit off tangent. Please bear with me and read on…

A snack in Western culture (and in most other cultures) is a type of food not meant to be eaten as a main meal of the day, but to assuage a person’s hunger between meals, providing a brief supply of energy to the body. The term may also refer to a food item consumed between meals purely for the enjoyment of its taste. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snack_food)

Quoting from Dr. Patrick Nemechek’s blog, “For every 100 calories difference in your diet, your weight will go up or down approximately 10 pounds in the course of 1 year. If you think about it, that’s the rate at which many of us put on the weight in the course of a year. Eating 100-200 calories per day is equal in calories to about 1 snack per day!” it is clear that snacks have a very detrimental effect on one’s health by insidiously increasing body weight, resulting in many health maladies like hypertension, diabetics, cardiac disease.

If we start substituting snacks for proper meals, we don’t need the good doctor’s diagnosis of what will happen to our health and well-being. We can predict it ourselves. At best, a snack may be consumed for the enjoyment of its taste, that too infrequently and in the smallest of portions, definitely not the Dagwood-typeJ. We need well-balanced meals, a major portion comprising unappetizing things like raw vegetables to maintain good health. We should not lose sight of the fact that we eat to live and not to enjoy the taste of what we eat.

Continuing in the same line of thinking, if we think that we can substitute serious, focused study that involves hours of hard work to gain deep insights into a subject with “knowledge” gained from twittering or similar kinds of exchanges in social networking, we are fooling ourselves. It applies to e-learning too, a domain in which our company operates. In my last month’s blog, Learning Predictions – 2010, I mentioned the increasing demand for quick-fix learning solutions. Organizations are asking for more learning “pills” rather than instructionally sound comprehensive e-learning courses that have been subjected to adhere to robust learning design principles and processes. Well, Alvin Toffler predicted this craving for impermanence and shortcuts decades ago. It is now every much here, whether we like it or not.

So, what do we do, as learning professionals? Our professional values and ethics will guide us. We will have to advise our customers what is best for them in the long run, what is important but not urgent.

In the language of arithmetical ratios, a snack is to nutrition is as twittering is to learning.

Thank you for reading my blog and for sharing your comments.

RK Prasad
CEO