Social Media and Workplace Learning: by Janet Clarey

Janet Clarey is an industry analyst and researcher. She covers social media, microlearning, e-learning, instructional design, and learning technologies for the workplace.

Where we are today:

• Primary forms of social learning technologies used in corporations today appear to be e-mail, live online learning (Web conferencing), threaded discussion, and collaborative content development.
• Organizations are just beginning to use social media technologies and few are using the social learning technologies available in their LMSs.
• For services outside the firewall, blockage continues to be an issue driven by such barriers as organizational culture, bandwidth limitations, security issues, IT resistance, and lack of resources.
• Most learning professionals view social media as valuable to learners, and usage is growing.
• Employers are still having trouble implementing collaborative solutions; hard to find support in the corporate environment.
• IT and senior leadership buy-in can be particularly difficult perhaps because it’s easy to find evidence of abuse that can undermine implementing social learning technologies. Social media, in general, is misunderstood in many organizations.
• More and more, learning management system companies are seeing the need to expand their solutions beyond a learning environment where classes and courses are the center of activity.
• Shared a diagram: team collaboration, increased personal productivity, community building (the ‘why’)
• Need to become experts on organizational communities

Reviewed:

• Social networking services (corporate learning applications): To identify experts on a topic – most “knowledge” exists in the heads of employees; to reduce the time to find connections and answers to questions; extend relationships beyond traditional classroom instruction and e-learning courses.
  
• Blogs: (corporate learning applications): Knowledge management tool, source of information, group project management tool, professional development, support service, method for obtaining feedback, project management, builds writing skills, networking by having conversations with others, capture the knowledge of experts.
  
• Wikis: Most versatile; can build just about anything on it …(ideas for starting out): give people something to do there, a reason to visit (build around the work), obtain management support, plan for change management if the culture is being changed, provide upfront training/coaching, maintain content, allow for emergence during growth/maintenance, involve a broad cross-section of people, consider templates for consistency, identify super-workers/techies to pilot wikis, seek feedback/evaluate.
  
• Microblogging: Pros: Real time messages help learners feel more like a community, questions get answered fast, it is good for providing immediate feedback, ability to communicate primarily using cell phones, can mass message a specific group, can provide a ‘backchannel’ to ILT for learners to participate, limited characters are good for summarizing (metacognition), public record exists of messages.
• Cons: A cost may be associated with receiving text messages via cell phone, not for everyone because it can be intrusive, productivity can suffer, the informal nature makes it hard to quantify, self-directed, self-motivated groups tend to define their own enterprise and may drift from organizational objectives, free transfer of information typical of social learning technologies may create problems in an environment that treats information as private, a public record exists of messages.
  
• Tagging/Bookmarking: Described how they worked; relatively low adoption but may increase as more LMSs include them.
• Presence: Some ways to use presence tools to enhance education: Allow learners to reveal (or conceal) their presence both synchronously and asynchronously. Provide both push and pull forms of notification. Provide a way to filter information. Provide cooperative learning support with encouragement to cooperate. Use a referral system to show successful learning networks. Link a resource to the learner (the system captures profile information). Introduce learners to each other. Provide help. Document and share: learners should be actively creating rather than consuming knowledge.
  
• Asked: Do you have a strategy for social media for learning? Majority “NO” (supports our prior surveys). Noted we don’t get much $$ without strategy.

Strategies:

• As part of a blended learning strategy
• To provide a community for learning professionals
• To provide a collaborative learning environment among cross-functional groups
• For knowledge management
• As part of a learning plan
• To create a place for informal learning
• For leadership development
• For professional development
• To develop and retain talent

Good Use Case:

• distributed workforce
• information/knowledge workers
• need for peer-to-peer collaboration
• need easy/anywhere access to information
• need access to SMEs
• supportive culture

Action Plan

1. Start small. Find opportunities where social learning technologies will foster learning.
   
2. Become an expert on the learners within your organization’s communities.
   
3. YOU need to use the tools yourself. Connect with someone right now.
   
4. Develop a strategy.
   
5. Incorporate into daily work. Make it part of ‘real work.’
   

Ending message: If you don’t have a supportive culture of openness and sharing, you have a problem. Need to do the work there first. Follow Vubiz on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.