Law & Order

The front page of this morning’s New York Times carried a story entitled As Jurors Turn to Web, Mistrials Are Popping Up. The judge in a big Federal drug trial in Florida was shocked (shocked!) to discover a juror had Googled information about the defendants. He declared a mistrial when it turned out that eight more jurors had used their iPhones and Blackberries to check out facts not in evidence.

Well, duh. Do judges really expect people to turn off their access to facts from the world at large? Using Google and Wikipedia for fact-checking are becoming the way of life. How long can courts maintain the fiction that jurors can be sequestered from the global infosphere?

This morning I also received a pointer to a survey of a thousand trainers and training managers by Elliott Masie. 40%-50% were using some sort of social media to enhance corporate learning. 40% found some value in social learning, and another 20% found high value. This makes me wonder what the remaining 40% were smoking.

“What percentage of your learning could be done with a social learning format?” Only 5% said more that 80%. The respondents must be responding as if the question were, “What percentage of the courses you’ve been offering could be done with a social learning format?”

After all, probably 80% of the learning going on in corporations is social. Improving the way that neglected aspect of corporate learning takes place is where the big reward is located.

Believe you me, if nine out of twelve jurors in Florida are grabbing case facts off the net, at least that proportion of corporate employees are engaged in social learning. There’s a lot more social learning going on than training directors, corporate execs, and judges are privy to.