These are my live blogged notes from today’s eLearning Guild Webinars with members of the Internet Time Alliance (ITA): Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn, Jane Hart, Jay Cross
Exploring Social Learning and Smarter Working
The questions for the session were sourced from the crowd. The people asked and ITA answers…
Working Smarter – all the things it takes to get things done in organizations.
Using new social technologies to help people get on with their jobs.
More of our work is in “exception handling” – not doing stuff we’ve done before.
How do you use social learning to support formal learning?
When we express our ideas and get input with others we are processing. Apprenticeship: working together on meaningful tasks.
How do you motivate people to participate in social learning when their schedules are already full?
Make work more fun! We love talking to people…make learning more social and fun.
How can we sell the idea of social learning to skeptical managers?
Tell your managers what you have learned!
Dirty Words: Training, Learner, eLearning, Informal, Social, School, Learning
What is the role of L&D specialists in working smarter?
“The future of the training department” (article by Harold and Jay)
L&D people should be focused on removing barriers – helping people work smarter or better.
Also changes in management. Enterprise 2.0 kinds of things – inverting the traditional management pyramid. The role of L&D is to communicate and connect those who are doing the work (at the top of the pyramid) and management whose job is to support them.
Companies are outsourcing their course development so internal L&D can focus on communicating and connecting.
L&D should help people focus on core skills – e.g., critical thinking skills.
Becoming CURATORS of information – tagging, editing.
Moderate social communities.
Creating “cultures of continuous learning”
Will mobile fundamentally alter the way we learn?
Clark says yes.
The 4C’s of mobile: Content, Capture, Compute, Communicate
Moving from event based model to “slow learning” – to match the way we learn and provide opportunities for repeated activation.
It’s not about putting a 60 minute elearning program on a smart phone – it’s about putting pieces into place and providing opps for continuous learning.
What are the ingredients of building a Community of Practice?
Groups of individuals in same team, other teams, other companies even – they come together to improve their practice.
Managers often don’t like words like ‘social’ and ‘collaboration’ – but ‘communities of practice’ seems to resonate.
Social Learning Community (Jane’s started a new community a few weeks ag0) – to talk about importance of social media for learning. Now has over 500 members.
How do you get it off the ground and how do you sustain it?
- Shared purpose
- Want to be there
- Experience facilitator (who can help in early days, but then have a lighter touch)
- Easy to use platform
A CoP is not just Twitter – needs to have a focus. Goal-oriented and opportunity driven. You know you’re in a CoP when it “changes your practice.”
How do you create a groundswell of social learning within an org from the bottom up to build community within, without alienating leadership from the top down?
How do you measure the impact of informal, social learning?
There are no such things as learning metrics. They are business metrics.
What is important when implementing social and informal learning?
Social learning is something you DO.
The 30 ways to use social learning to work and learn smarter (Jane Hart’s program: www.c4lpt.co.uk/workingsmarter)
You don’t really understand these tools until you immerse yourselves in them. “You have to marinate in this stuff to understand it.”
Wrapping it up
Find senior folks who get it and have them share the benefits.
Measure it – employee engagement, customer satisfaction, etc. – look at your outputs and real impact (not learning metrics).
The big picture is work and performance at work. If we keep that in mind, we’ll have create more value at our organizations.
http://InternetTimeAlliance.com
http://WorkingSmarterDaily.com
www.c4lpt.co.uik/community.html for Social Learning Community
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback//working-smarter-fieldbook-2011/14459342 The Working Smarter Book
