Curriculum-free, interactive, self-service learning is the way of the future, but it’s a future most training departments are not quite ready to adopt.

Most of us agree on where we’re headed: to ecologies where work and learning are one and the same, where people help one another build competency and master new crafts, where members of self-sustaining communities of professionals participate because they take pride in maintaining their standards and doing a great job, and where everyone strives to be all she can be. Open, participative, bottom-up, networked, flexible, responsive: that’s what we’re after.

If only it were that simple. Learning professionals are already over-burdened. Budgets are tight. The economy is a shambles. Management demands cost-effective, rapid-impact solutions. And they want them up and running tomorrow.

Pulling this off requires choosing among a myriad of new technologies, coordinating with IT, cobbling together social networking tools, CYA with legal, monitoring social network performance, and answering demands for new approaches, all the while doing the old job with fewer resources and more demands.

Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Clark Quinn, and I have been helping CLOs and learning managers deal with these issues, but talk alone doesn’t solve anything. This is like blogging, where you’ve got to try it in order to understand it. We thought about how to accelerate prototyping and experimentation.

Over the last month, we have assembled an online environment to support a team a dozen to 150 people working and learning together. Our suite of low-cost, proven web software provides online space for conversation and collaboration, personal and professional profiles, following group activities in real time (online and/or by mobile phone), sharing insights and developments, building and retaining collective intelligence, scheduling and conducting meetings, monitoring subscriptions to industry and community news, tracking competitive information, collaborative writing, and more. It operates “in the cloud” and is ready to activate the day after you contact us. Don’t ask IT; just do it.

Advice on implementation comes from learning professionals, not software geeks. Jane knows social networking tools as well as anyone in the industry; Harold has his finger on the pulse of bottom-up learning and open source approaches; Clark is a passionate advocate of cognitive design, applying what we know about how people think to the design of systems. Jay is the thought leader in informal learning and the convergence of work and learning online.

We can get you started for as little as $2,500, although you’ll probably opt for additional services.

We are looking for a few organizations to torture-test our informal learning sandbox. If you’re an early adopter, please get in touch. Give us a call or complete this form. One of us will be in touch.

Learnscape Sandbox Set-up