- Blog
- January 2010
January 2010
Published on January 31, 2010 by Karen Letain in News
Alright, I have to admit so far I like the iPad, but then again, I like pretty much everything that apple has done the past few years. At an expected retail price of $499, I know that it will probably be my children's next choice for a laptop. I can't help how this hybrid smartphone/laptop technology will actually transform traditional e-learning.
The traditional keyboard will slowly be replaced by touch screen and rapid eye hand coordination required for screen movement and placement of objects. Traditional e-learning in powerpoint or flash will quickly be replaced by the mere fact that our children will no longer require typing skills the way we did. They will be able to manipulate and move screens and re-configure by hand movement alone.
This means, we need to adapt the learning environment. We need to be able to provide learning in short segments that are not only entertaining but able to build upon each other. Like traditional children's building blocks, we will need to be able to build learning that is highly flexible and adaptable to the next generation of learners.
Published on January 25, 2010 by Karen Letain in Planning
A relatively easy way to start ensuring that your employees have a fundamental base of security awareness knowledge is to embed it in the orientation and new hire process. Having the new hire go through a security awareness training program that is linked to corporate policy knowledge ensures that the employee understands not only the policy itself but the risks and consequences of not adhering to that policy. Security awareness training during the orientation stage also makes the new employee more likely to recognize and detect potential breaches. Mike Rothman provides some guidance to CSO's on how to incorporate security awareness into orientation training in his post http://tinyurl.com/y93vdrd.
The challenge of course is ensuring that the HR department is in sync with the IT department or with the organization's CSO to ensure that this type of training gets included, the delivery method that is most effective and how to reinforce the behavior once initially learned. Does your organization include security awareness in its new hire training program? Is it effective?
Published on January 15, 2010 by Karen Letain in Marketing and Communications, Planning
I had dinner with a good friend last night and the discussion, as usual, lingered toward work-related topics. The company that she works for (a large multi-national company) recently decided to enforce a clean desk policy for security purposes. Nothing wrong with that, except; this company did it to the extreme. Employees can not have even a small amount of anything on their desk. If they do happen to leave an item on their desk, a note goes into their employee file and points are taken off of their quarterly employee assessment which is directly tied to bonus and payment increases. Obviously, this has all employees grumbling and complaining and wondering if next they will be subject to body searches in order to go use the washrooms.
Had the company instead, communicated effectively with their employees through perhaps a well constructed campaign employees would have been able to understand and even, dare I say it...embrace the policy with the understanding that they are assisting the organization in maintaining a stellar level of security protection. Instead, the drastic measures of affecting their personal performance indicators has only led to an employee based frustrated and angry with their employer. How would you have handled it?
Published on January 07, 2010 by Karen Letain in News
I have been reviewing how we can make security awareness training more exciting and more relevant for the learner this year. What new tools can we add to the toolbox that will inspire the learner to actually change their behaviors when it comes to being aware of security risks.
With the plethora of social media, video and other communication tools out there, I figure there has to be some way to tie all of these mediums together to produce a truly awesome ongoing weekly awareness campaign. You can tweet about it, put together a video on youtube that you can put on the internal website or use some free video animation tools to flash images that resonate to the learner's everyday work tasks. This past year, Terranova spent a lot of time on the development of new online content with a different pedagogical format focusing more on risks/consequences/threats and best practices than prior versions. We also spent time creating new videos that can be used to promote awareness on various topics. However, I think we really need to look at what can be done with all of these other wonderful tools out there. What are you planning to do this year to freshen up your training? We would love to hear about your ideas!
