“Happy Computers’ Learnfizz is an innovative application that is aimed at crowd-sourcing learning content within the public domain and making it readily available on a world-wide basis. Contributors are encouraged to develop their own, or highlight, learning content that is freely available and then, in a collaborative environment, it is made available throughout the world in an easily accessible format.

“The programme has the potential to create enormous benefit in both deprived and wealthy communities, and it is an excellent example of the way in which social media technology and collaboration architecture can integrate learning resources in the public domain and make them accessible through an advanced learning portal.”

“I am so delighted with this award”, explained Happy Chief Executive Henry Stewart. “It is a great endorsement for what we believe is a product that can help shape the way people learn in the future. We hope that whether you are a learning professional, an inner-city teacher or a child in Africa this will enable you ton find great learning resourcers – for free.”

Runners-up in the award were BT and the Open University. The Learning & Performance Institute was until last year known as the Institute of IT Training.

Last night Learnfizz won Gold for Social Media Learning Product of the Year at the 2012 Learning Awards, competing against BT and the Open University. This is very exciting for a product that is still very much in beta, but shows the potential people see in it. We hope it will become an essential tool for anybody wanting to learn useful stuff for free.

What is Learnfizz?

Charles Jennings described Learnfizz as ‘Delicious for Learning’. Bill Thompson preferred “Trip Adviser for Education”. Both are fair descriptions. Like Delicious, Learnfizz is based on social bookmarking, but gets its real value from the potential for  curation. There is a hell of a lot of information out there on the web and we need tools to keep track of what we find useful and easily curate it. The idea of Learnfizz is to use crowdsourcing to find the best free learning, to rate it and then make it easy to create combinations (or ‘mixes’) to use and share with others.

Some stuff is easy to find on Google. If you want to find historical facts, Google will normally take you to a pretty reliable page on Wikipedia. But try to learn how to do appraisals or write a business plan or give a great presentation and Google normally takes you to lots of sites trying to sell you stuff – courses, or reports or products. Yet on all these subjects there is lots of great free stuff available on the web. Its just hard to find. What we need is a site to make it easy to find and organise the best free learning on the web. That is what Learnfizz aims to do.

So whats the business model, people ask? What we are trying to do is create a business that has real positive social benefit, in helping people to learn, but also works financially. The idea is that anybody will be able to use the site for free. Thats vital to ensure we get enough links added. But large organisations tell us they will pay for a subscription version, branded for them, tracking how their people use it, linking to their resources as well as web-based ones and where they can decide what is included and what is prominent.

Where it all started

Last May a client asked for links to free online learning for Learning at Work day. Despite having seen lots of great stuff, I had no easy way to share it. Eventually I spent an hour going through my twitter feed and managed to send around a dozen links. If she asks me this year, I will be able to quickly send over hundreds of great links, organised conveniently into mixes. I don’t think I’m alone in this. At the Learning & Performance Conference in September I asked learning professionals if they had somewhere they stored their favourite learning links. About half said Yes. I asked those if they could easily share them. None of them could.

With Learnfizz you can, at little more than the click of a button (once you’ve added the Fizzit button to your toolbar), store any piece of learning or information that you come across. You can share it as an individual link or you can add it to a mix and share that. Over time we hope to build up a range of great combinations of learning, all of it freely available – whether you  are a learning professional in a big organisation, a teacher in the inner city or a child in Africa.

Create learning resources quickly, really quickly

Last week I heard Ray Kurzweil talk about the Singularity, the point at which machines will allegedly become more intelligent than humans. It was quite a talk, both inspiring and terrifying and there were dozens of information-packed slides. The slides were not available and the talk left many questions unanswered. So I did some research and quickly collected together a mix on the topic. It included a similar slide talk, a 7 minute talk by Kurzweil, more detailed explanations and also his critics. So the next morning I was able to tweet round this learning guide, and hundreds clicked through to learn more about a topic that had sparked their interest.

That is the potential of Learnfizz. Anybody in an organisation will be able to quickly create a curated learning resource by simply linking together different pieces of information. And in much less time than it takes to create traditional e-learning. Indeed, as I did with Kurzweil, you can create a resource that is very useful in under an hour.

We are still in our early days at the start of what we hope will be an exciting journey. Its still too clunky to create a mix but please do try. Please add the Fizzit button, bookmark some pages and create a mix. And then let me know how you found it. We are keen to find out how people will use Learnfizz and what to develop next.

Please do try it out, let us know what you like and what would make it even better for you. We want to create a resource that reflects what people like you need.

Happy Ltd & Action for Happiness calling for happier workplaces for all.

The evidence is clear: Happy workplaces are the most productive & successful.

Today sees a call for radical change in the way we treat people at work, as Henry Stewart, founder of Happy Ltd, and Action for Happiness launch a new Manifesto for happier workplaces. A happy, fulfilling work environment isn’t just great for staff, it also delivers huge benefits to business in terms of a more motivated workforce, improved productivity and ultimately better long-term financial performance.

“Imagine a workplace where you are energised and motivated by being in control of the work you do”, explains Henry. “Imagine you are trusted and given freedom, with support,  to decide how to achieve results. Imagine you can get the life balance you want. Imagine you are valued according to the work you do, not how many hours you spend at the desk.”

“Wouldn’t you want to work in such a place? Wouldn’t it also enable you to work at your best and be most productive?”

An increasing number of companies are finding that focus on creating a happy workplace is just about the most important thing management can do:

• A major restaurant chain found the most important factor in growth and profits was how happy staff are (and then changed manager’s bonuses to be based on this)
• Over 25 years, investing your pension in happy workplaces would get you £230,000, against £100,000 in standard stock market
• Latest opinion poll shows only 2% work simply to pay the bills. For 90% it is important to be happy at work.
• Yet over half of British employees say they are unhappy at work.

Book Launch: “The Happy Manifesto: make your organisation a great place to work – now”
Monday 21st November, 6-8pm. Cass Business School, 106 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8TZ

“A wonderful book – a gripping read and so interesting, as well as wise. It is truly inspiring”
Professor Richard Layard.

This campaign is part of a global movement for change. In the US Tony Hsieh (who sold his shoe retailer Zappos to Amazon fro close to a billion dollars) has signed up thousands to his “Delivering Happiness” approach. In Denmark Chief Happiness Officer Alex Kjerulf has influenced many workplaces. In India 80,000 strong HCL shares the philosophy of “Employees first, customers second”.

Henry Stewart is founder and CEO of training company Happy Ltd. Happy have been rated the best company in the UK for customer service (by Management Today) and one of the best 20 workplaces in the UK for the last five years (Financial Times / Great Place to Work Institute). Henry himself is a popular business speaker and is listed in the guru radar.

Action for Happiness is a movement of people and organisations taking practical action to create a happier society for everyone. Founded by Lord Richard Layard, Anthony Seldon and Geoff Mulgan, it was launched in April 2011 and already has 18,000 members who are taking positive action in their homes, workplaces and communities.

Sources of Data:

Restaurant chain, full details in the Happy Manifesto
Investing your pension
Only 2% work just to pay the bills, Bloomsbury
Over half of employees are unhappy at work: Mercer

We’d like to thank everyone who has given us feedback on the drafts up until now. We’re very proud of the final product, and hope you will find it thought provoking and challenging.

The Happy Manifesto will soon be available in paperback (more details to follow). However, we’re still making available to download free of charge from the website.

Instructions How To Print

If you’d like to print the PDF version, you should be aware that the document is set to A5. You’ll need to make sure your printing settings are correct – so you get 2 pages per side of A4.

The actual settings will depend on your own printing software / set up. But as a general guide, you might find this helpful.

Firstly, make sure you print ‘multiple pages per sheet’ – and that you choose 2 pages per page (see below).

You’ll also need to make sure that you’re printing in landscape. Most of the time you can set this by selecting ‘properties’ (see above – top right).

Depending upon your printer, it might look like the following:

If you’re still having promlems printing, then contact us for more advice.

Although a seasoned public speaker in the business world, he decided to make the leap from simply making entertaining speeches to a full blown comedy routine. And in front of an audience who had paid to see something to make them laugh.

The theme of the evening was business, so much of Henry’s material was focused on management, and how it can go awfully wrong.

Here are the highlights from his spot…

You’ll find a guide to all our publics courses, dates and prices. There’s a recap of the latest goings on at Happy, some more information on the people who work here and some quotes from our satisfied clients.

We have a selection of new courses to choose from, this time – including extra social media courses. To find out more, call us on 020 73757300 or contact us via the site.

Henry gave a presentation on how to create a happier workplace, a key priority for the campaign. He asked the audience “how would you organisation be different if the focus of management was on making your people happy”. Check out the full 6 minute video below.

Happy Computers was awarded Silver in this year’s IT Training Company of the Year awards. The judges described Happy as “a shining light in the IT training sector”, going on to say that “Happy’s success is based on providing ‘experiences’ rather than selling packaged ‘products’. This was the twelfth year that Happy has been a finalist. The company has won Gold twice, Silver four times and Bronze on three occasions.

Nadya Nathan: IT Trainer of the Year 2011

Nadya Nathan, IITT Trainer of the Year 2011

Nadya joined Happy straight from university and quickly took on major responsibilities. She is currently building our Projects division, delivering major learning roll-outs to companies like Pfizer.

The judges applauded Nadya’s “highly involving and engaging approach to analysing, developing and supporting learners in their skills journey.” They were especially impressed by Nadya’s “extensive business knowledge, by her empathy, and by her ability to translate business requirements into skills needs, and then into performance gains.”

At the time WordPerfect 5.1 was the latest word processing software, taking over from Wordstar and Multimate. Windows 3 had only just being released and Word for Windows had barely been heard of. Supercalc and Lotus were the spread-sheets of choice, and were a bit basic. Henry remembers teaching people how to enter a 12 digit code to print in landscape. The idea of the world wide web was still being worked on by Tim Berners Lee in his Swiss laboratory. We spent £1,300 per machine to get PCs with 16 MB of hard disk space and a whopping 4MB of RAM.

A lot has changed since then. Technology is miles ahead, software is much easier to use and the web has changed just about everything. We now train online, and deliver webinars as well as our core class room training. But the core principles on which Happy Computers was founded, of involvement and making learning about computers fun – and having a positive effect on society, remain in place. We are very proud of our record of 20 years as an independent training company.