What do you do when you reach your 500th blog post? Julian Stodd is using the occasion to run an event – Learning:500 – based on the conversation, networking and research explored in his posts and across his wider network.
Stodd’s journey to creating the one-day event is an interesting one. With a background in post-graduate research into educational psychology and online learning, he started an elearning company Marton House. That was 13 years ago and having grown that to a £5m turnover business he sold it to GP Strategies where he is now learning director.
Selling Marton House enabled Stodd to get back to his research roots and explore his areas of interest – learning theory, technology and social learning and the role of communities and stories in telling narratives around learning. He started his Learning Blog two years ago and has been blogging nearly every day since.
He also uses his networks to explore some of these emergent ideas in corporate learning. He has a growing Linkedin Group and is active on Twitter – all great sources for sharing ideas and getting feedback.
Last year he staged a pop-up learning event in a museum in Amsterdam in which he toured the museum posing questions across his networks as he went. The aim was to see how learning narratives could be created out of events. The event attracted 30 collaborators online.
Learning:500 represents Stodd’s desire to run an annual learning event. Learning:500 will cover a range of topic areas that Stodd has researched in his writing. Topics include:
1 Social learning and creating communities
Exploring how we create social spaces, who owns them, how technology facilitates these spaces but doesn’t deliver it, why people engage in communities and questions around moderation and control.
2 Mobile
This will explore the mindset of performance support not the technology.
3 Languages of learning
Starting with the premise that we rely mainly on the written word and some audio and video in our formal communication, this session will look at a range of other ways in which we learn, including smell, dance, Manga animation and music.
And it doesn’t stop there. Stodd is currently interviewing musicians to find out how they learn music and how this can be applied outside of music.
Learning:500 takes place in London on Thursday 17 January. Sign up here.
