In this fourth part of my series of posts on Learning 2.0, I would like to present some of the ideas I have been exploring in parts 1, 2, and 3, in the context of specific examples. This article will look at how networked learning helps to improve productivity and innovation for individuals.

I am a networked learner. I am looking to hire networked learners. Networked learners are distinguished by:

• Larger and deeper social networks.

• More people outside of our organizations in our networks.

• Being more aware of who and where to go to to get critical information.

• Investing significantly more time in the development and maintenance of their networks.

Here's how my personal learning network works for me:

Here are three people in my network. I know Al Essa from some work we did at the Sloan School at MIT. He was CIO there. Through Al I met Bill Ives. Bill is an avid blogger and wrote a book on the subject. I scan his blog for information and find useful things in it.

In December I read in Bill’s blog about a guy named Rod Boothby who is writing a blog called Innovation Creators. Bill’s excerpt of Rod’s work led me to Rod’s blog Innovation Creators.

I use a personal desktop aggregator to scan about 100 or so blogs each day. Of the 100 I scan for headlines, there are only a couple that I read word for word. Innovation Creators is one of them.

After reading Rod’s blog for a month or so, I realized that we were working on very similar problems and that in an ideal world we should become collaborators. So I called Rod up and had a long chat with him about our mutual interests.

Now I am connected to Rod == networked to him by virtue of common interests and personal camraderies. So we’ve shared our professional networks.

And I can track who else is reading Rod’s stuff by looking at who else has tagged his worked on the social bookmarking service del.icio.us.

And I can track the blogs that Rod is reading. My connection to Rod is very valuable. He is an “intelligent filter” of all sorts of useful information that I need to do my job. And he is one of about 20 people with whom I am networked in this way for learning. People like Rod make me look a lot smarter than I really am. And I hope I do the same for him.

Networked learners use the Learning 2.0 toolkit to build personal learning networks populated by carefully cultivated intelligent filters in the form of people like Rod. But we also use search and aggregation tools to create our own intelligent information filters.

In part 5 of this series, I will look at networked learning in the context of a specific business process: innovation.

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