3. social learning FTW (or why social learning shouldn’t scare the crap out of you) Presented by mochiaramonti I’m an instructional designer. I like gratuitous cat photos.
What is the last thing you learned? how did you learn it? Where did you find the information? Did you share it?
Traditional Learning environments, while still relevant – areExpensiveTime consumingDifficult to manage and sometimes…..
Boring. Especially for some of the new learners you are going to encounter. Learner’s who are used to pulling their information to them, rather than waiting for you to push it to them.
Traditional Classrooms are set up like this….the trainer delivers the information, has access to the experts, and tells you what you need to know. They take all the knowledge and skills, and funnel it through resource constraints of time, personnel, technology, accessibility, and deliver a training class -----then you go back to work and forget a great deal of it.
But what if learning looked like this? in reality learning already does, you just aren’t around for much of it f2f. this Learners interact with each other and collaborate after the traditional learning event ends. is what social and informal learning is all about – Learning through work , learning from doing and communicating with others doing the same work, on their own time in a way that is convenient to them.
All sorts of scary things, right? Your learners forget things, don’t follow through on things, get details confused, feel lost and disconnected….
So, what does social learning look like on the interwebz? Sites like facebook, youtube, Slideshare, Wordpress, and Twitter – much of that functionality of networking, tagging, fileshareing, communcation/collaboration etc is mirrored on Dlive. But, you have reservations…right? Let’s look at some reasons why….
“If we introduce social media and utilize social networking , our people will spend most of their time socializing instead of working… “Actually, they do this already. Abusers will be abusers, whether online or F2F. Play is ok – encourage it – it helps people to become relaxed and want to use the technology.
Control is an illusion. 80% of learning happens outside of a trainer’s controlled system.The community controls the information.The community (should) includes the experts. (great things happen when your shorten the paths to the experts)The community self polices.
Exposing this “bad” learning via social learning opportunities provides option for influence, correcting, improving and extending.People already share bad information and in scary ways.Having a platform where we can share bad information can uncover hidden experts and have that information corrected – all before it becomes a problem.
You want to measure for results, things like Reduction in turn overFaster time to competencyIncreased productivity (not spending large amounts of time finding answers, but implementing solutions)
What else you got?
So what do you do first?….try it yourself. There are a great deal of social learning outlets geared just for the training community.
#lrnchat - #lrnchat is an online chat over the social messaging service Twitter. Participants are people interested in the topic of learning from one another and who want to discuss how to help other people learn in formal, informal, social and mobile ways.
Blogs: The Rapid E-Learning Blog shares practical tips and tricks to help you become a rapid elearning pro.It is hosted by Tom Kuhlmann who has over 15 years of hands-on experience in the training industry and currently runs the community at Articulate.And he has great template downloads for powerpoint.
Discussion groups/communities of practice – wow…this kinda looks like Dlive right?!?!?...So lets talk about how to leverage dlive to support your social learning efforts…
Ideas to start with - Extend the training experience.Start a discussion thread – name it the class name that you teach. Have learners go back there after class to post questions to you (rather than emailing them – get away from that 1:1 interaction. Turn it into a 1:many interaction and only answer those questions once. OrHave separate threads for your learners by class – and pose questions and challenges to them at intervals after the class to keep the material fresh and find out if they are having challenges.
Provide practice opportunities – Design wikis with scenarios on them. Break classes into teams and have them brainstorm ideas for different performance problems.
Support your learners – There are always questions – by creating FAQ’s (wiki pages) or discussion threads you can bring your learners together collectively – have them answer questions amongst themselves, self correct, and monitor their conversations/postings to make sure their information is correct.