Formal education is the signal amongst a sea of information. It is the expedited version of “googling”, the prioritizing of the most critical nuggets, and learning at it’s most efficient (and cost-effective depending on your medium)… from one person’s perspective - the instructor’s.

If I were ever to teach a class (which I’ve been known to do on occasion), I would preface the session with an ask of my audience-to-be.

Go out and find your first ten percent.

How much fun would it be if everyone came to my training with a variety of their own nuggets? What if the class had all managed to successfully navigate their way past the first ten percent that is awareness? How much time would we save? How much more interesting would the learning be?

Coming to class ready has never been easier. If you have the chance to teach, try pointing your audience to these 5 resources before your first face-to-face. It help ensure you’re all starting from the same informed place (the first 10%).

1. Delicious.com - This is probably my foremost way of finding out what the world thinks is interesting based on the keywords I’m about to learn. If I’m teaching a class on social media best practices, I’ll type “social media learning” into this tagging engine and instantly see a community of bookmarked pages from around the world.
2. Seek Out Discussion Forums - These are not your graveyard forums of 5 years back when the only people “discussing” were the early adopters and desperate answer seekers. Today’s forums are vibrant, insightful and full or diversity.
3. Wikis - Start one. Make it home base for your learners. Allow them to contribute links, thoughts, and make new pages - try to keep it as open-ended as possible. Wikis are so easy that anyone can pick it up (no training required).
4. Create a Hash Tag on Twitter - A hash tag is when you end a twitter post with something of a category i.e. #inaug09. This allows all your learners to do a search based on this hash tag and essentially read a real time feed of what everyone is thinking on the topic leading up to the training. It will become a better version of “chat” in that you can embed links and move the conversation in and out of the larger Twitter community.
5. Google Alerts - Why search the web for relevant news and trends when Google can do it for you. If you set an alert for keywords surrounding your topic, they will get delivered to your inbox at whatever frequency you’d like to see. This will ensure everyone is “in the know.”

For those of us trying to stay on top of trends in the learning space, consider this: How can you re-purpose the tried, tested and true?

It’s easy for us to get caught up in the really big “2.0 what-a-do” of large scale project implementations, systems integrations and markup languages, but what happens to our brains when we see headway being made by a whiteboard?!

I know that in my head, the light goes on and the words tumble right out… “BUT OF COURSE!”

That was my reaction the first time I watched the Common Craft Show. This dynamic duo (husband and wife) were teaching me about some of the newest tools and trends in web 2.0 by using cut-outs, erasable markers and a whiteboard. Granted, the scripting was perfected and they knew of what they spoke… but seriously, paper cut-outs!?! It’s almost too perfect.

Believe it or not, the CC team didn’t arrive at this magic mix on the first try. Nope. They experimented and experimented some more… falling short a few times here and there. Until finally they decided that laying a whiteboard on the floor would work. And work it did. Now they do custom instructional videos for the likes of Google and Salesforce as well as other big name companies who’ve jumped on the bandwagon. But they haven’t forgotten the secret of the web and still provide a Common Craft branded version of their “101″ videos free to YouTube viewers.

And if you’re ever trying to explain social media to your own customers and want to license a video of theirs, you can. It’s cheap to do and you get the white labeled version.

So the next time you’re wondering about what instructional designs of the future might look like - consider remixing what’s right in front of you first. In many ways, this is the mashup mentality you’ll need to get good at in order to survive the social web revolution.