On Thursday night I participated in a #lrnchat session on Twitter with other people interested in learning. The theme of the chat was, "learning from each other socially in different ways." I logged on a few minutes early and was politely greeted by a few others who were already there. At the appointed start time, the chat leader began tweeting the rules. They appeared on screen one by one, interspersed with greetings from other chatters who were just arriving. There were seven rules in all. The gist of which I have repeated here:
Introduce yourself and your location
Share your favorite topics
Write complete thoughts so those seeing your tweets outside of the chat will understand them
Play nice (but sarcasm was welcomed!)
Periodically retweet so others will understand the context of your responses (I didn't get this at first, but I got it now)
Remember to include #lrnchat in all posts (Putting this at the end of your tweets includes your post in the chat stream)
Five minutes before the end of the session, let the group know if you need anything from them and then close by reintroducing yourself
After all the rules were read, several threads of discussion took place. I paid attention and participated in a few, but there were several others that went right by me.
The first thread I followed had responses to a prompt asking, "What have you learned this week?" Some learned about instructional design, some about twitter; I typed that I learned there is a community of learners that meets through Tweetchat on Thursday nights.
Then we began to discuss social learning. One person suggested social learning is the convergence of ideas. Someone else suggested that all learning is social. Several people refuted this with examples and testimony. I asked, "How does social learning fit into the corporate learning world with its security restrictions and data privacy concerns?" One person sent me a direct response saying, "It doesn't...it's the very antithesis...uncontrolled by "the man" and self/group constructed." I thought that was interesting, since one of my goals is to learn how to bring these tools into the corporate learning environment. I'll be thinking about this one for a while.
Someone asked, "If Socrates coulda' tweeted...would that be social learning?" This garnered the response: Socratweets!
After all of this, a good discussion thread got started on learning measurement. Certainly it is difficult to get a handle on the impact that learning through social media could have on a business. It was clear that this issue creates a barrier for acceptance in the corporate learning world.
In all, the chat lasted ninety minutes. I had fun participating in it and afterwards - as a good learner should do - I took time to reflect. So here is a brief summary of my thoughts about my experiences with social learning this week:
I have been blogging for about two months now. During that time I have been reading and connecting with other bloggers. It is through one of these connections that I discovered the existence of the #lrnchat group
By linking back to another blogger who read and commented on one of my blogs, I learned some of the vocabulary and syntax used to make tweeting more effective
Through #lrnchat, I learned that there is more to twitter than just isolated tweets
I learned that twitter can be effective for learning if you have people with common interests all tweeting together at the same time
I learned you can make your tweeting more meaningful by using techniques like retweeting, direct replies, and writing complete thoughts
So I think I'm beginning to get the idea of social learning. I'm not ready to include it in my instructional strategies at work yet, but I'm hopeful that I will be able to at some point.
For you curious social anthropologist types, here is a link to Thursday's #lrnchat transcript. Be warned, you have to navigate through the zigzag nature of the discussion threads. As a matter of fact, someone in the group suggested coining a new term for this: Zigzag Learning.
What's in Your Instructional Strategy?
So here I am at the latter stages of a rather hectic day trying once again to gather and process my thoughts about social learning. Why is it such a popular topic in the learning community right now? Why have I been nearly obsessing over these tools for the last few months?
My October 3 post on the topic has gotten some attention, including a comment from John Darling who reminds us, "...it is also important that we not confuse the "tools" (e.g. twitter, forums, linkedins, etc.) with the process. These technologies are simply one part of the means we can use..." Of course John is right. Social learning tools just provide another media option for consideration when developing your instructional strategy. A good instructional designer considers the learning goal, learner characteristics, performance context, objectives and measures, and then considers delivery options that might be appropriate for the situation. Costs and practicality issues help to narrow down the choices and ultimately drive the final decision.
So why all the fuss? Unlike other delivery systems, social learning tools hold the promise of capturing and sharing informal learning. That is a valuable prize for those of us who have devoted our careers to helping others improve their job performance.
At the beginning of this year, my team launched a redesigned onboarding program for our newly hired sales representatives. As part of our analysis before the redesign, we interviewed participants from the older version of the program. A few months after their graduation, we asked them what their most valuable learning experiences during the program were. None of the people we interviewed cited the formal elements of the program (such as the elearning modules or webinars) as most valuable. Instead, they said their most valuable experiences were, "riding along with seasoned sales reps" and, "listening over the cubicle wall when experienced sales reps were on the phone with customers." Armed with this feedback my team was determined to find a way to capture these experiences and build them into our new program. For the most part, we have succeeded. We developed activities that foster these interactions and we use a wikispace to allow program participants to share and learn from each other's experiences.
Ultimately, we would like to allow this type of learning to take place in all of our programs. The bottom line is that people learn a lot from each other. Social media tools can help us to harness some of those individual experiences and spread them around to benefit more people. That is why I continue on this mini-quest of mine.
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