I like anthologies. How could I go to the beach without Gardner Dozois? And while I might be financially better off without Green Linnet’s Celtophile series of CDs, my shelves and my heart would be emptier in more ways than one.

Blog carnivals are a kind of anthology-on-the-fly, a collection of posts from several blogs. For each issue of a carnival, participants post on their own blogs, and a host posts links to all the participating posts. Like with Encephalon, the cognitive-science carnival.

I invited a few people to kick off a carnival under this particular tent: “Work at learning; learning at work.” I was thinking that posts and participants would connect in some way to training or learning in the workplace (as opposed to school or higher education). And I encouraged the invitees to suggest another blogger people might not have read.

Herewith, the first Working/Learning Blog Carnival:

• Michele Martin at The Bamboo Project shares strategies for supporting personal learning environments, nicely tying together the “work at learning” (you have to hone your craft) with “learning at work.”
• Cathy Moore at Making Change explains how to fit the entire world into a multiple choice question. How can you require the learner to think more deeply about on-the-job implications of the information at hand?
• Harold Jarche writes at his eponymous blog about learning at work, offering three easy steps to making sense out of the information that floods past you — as he says, moving from “this is an interesting idea” to “this is what I know.”
• Janet Clarey writes on her blog about working at learning. And she does mean working.
• …and my own contribution, SME? Not for Me, in which I ever so gently nudge people who design training, hoping to move them from subject-matter to practice.

Some other folks weren’t able to contribute in time for this first carnival. I think we’ll do it again and help widen the range of thoughts that people share about working and learning.