zondag 28 maart 2010
zaterdag 27 maart 2010
What really is social learning?
Is “social learning” just a buzzword or does it really mean something new for Learning and Development? Jane Hart, an independent Social Learning Consultant, and founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, provides her thoughts.
The emergence of social media tools in the 2000s has changed the face of the Web. It is now clear from the statistics that a huge number of people are using these tools in their daily lives, e.g. “If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia” and “YouTube is now the #2 largest search engine in the world”.
This year's Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009 was once again dominated by social media tools; the Top 10 included Slideshare, Wordpress, Google Docs, YouTube, Google Reader and Delicious, with Twitter ranking No 1 on the list. But as one commentator put it, is it just a matter of “get social and you’ll learn”?
To answer these questions, I spent some time analysing the top 10 tools lists of learning professionals worldwide and the documented reports of examples of use of social media in workplace learning. It soon became very clear that social media was being used for many different types of “learning” within an organisation. Whereas it has recently become fashionable to differentiate learning as either "formal" or "informal" – terms which have become a little confused, if not abused - I identified 5 categories of (social) learning.
Formal Structured Learning - education and training
For many people, this is how they define "learning". This is formal education and training; classes, workshops, etc - either face-to-face or online which are "pushed" to the learner. Although most workplace training is still very much focused on the creation and delivery of content, social media (wikis, blogging, for instance) are sometimes used to “add-on” social activity to an online course, whereas in education, (schools, colleges, universities etc), social activity is much more integrated into the course and classroom, and in some cases a fully collaborative approach to learning is employed so that the learner is a full and active participant in the formal learning process. “Social learning” in this context therefore describes a collaborative, sharing approach to formal learning.However, it is clear that individuals are using social media to "learn" in many other ways which have nothing to do with being trained or taught by anyone, as the following categories show.
Personal Directed Learning - finding things out for or by yourself
Many individuals organise and manage their own personal “learning”, that is they are by themselves, finding and using both informational and instructional content to address their learning problems, as well as connecting with others to build a professional learning network where they can ask and answer questions and have discussions with others. Social media, and in particular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have made this easy to set up.Group Directed Learning - working with a team or other group of people to solve your problems
Here groups of individuals learn and work together, e.g. in work teams, on projects, in study groups, or in a coaching/mentoring capacity. This is an extension of Personal Directed Learning, and to accomplish this self-organising groups are making good use of a range of social media/collaboration tools to create their own “shared learning/working environments” or group spaces, where they communicate and collaborate with one another, as well as share information, resources, contacts and experiences in order to improve the performance and productivity of the whole group or team.Intra-Organisational Learning – learning from everyone in the organisation
This is when employees are sharing information and resources with others throughout the organisation, to keep each other up to date and up to speed on strategic and other internal initiatives and activities. Although some organisations are beginning to put in place internal social collaboration environments for employees to share news, resources etc with other another, as well as improve communication between employees, others are, once again, self-organising and using external social media tools to do this themselves.5 – Accidental & Social Learning - acquiring knowledge without realising it
This is where individuals “learn” without consciously realising it (aka incidental or random learning, or even "learning at the water cooler"). Although accidental learning can take place in any of the above scenarios as well as in other personal or professional settings, some individuals like to take advantage of possible serendipitous learning that might occur using social media (e.g. in social networks). Although organisations normally don’t concern themselves with this type of “learning”, it is nevertheless important to recognise that it take place.
