Exploring the World of Social Learning

Exploring the World of Social Learning

Published by Julian Stodd at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Julian Stodd

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Social Learning: the basics

About me

1 - The corporate colonisation of informal space.

2 - Establishing online communities.

3 - Is your best work done at home?

4 - When worlds collide.

5 - Who owns you?

6 - Exploring the Twittersphere.

7 - Social dilemmas in social networks.

8 - Getting engaged to social learning.

9 - Extending the learning.

10 - Who doesn’t want to speak to me?

11 - Excuse me, is that really you?

12 - Idle chatter?

13 - Reports of the death of conversation have been greatly exaggerated.

14 - Winners and losers.

15 - Can you have a coordinated media strategy in a world of informal relationships?

16 - Can you actually build an effective online community?

17 - Who owns the truth?

18 - Leader of the Gang.

19 - Map reading in online spaces.

20 - Why do we choose the words we do?

21 - Selling out social media.

22 - How big is a ‘community’?

23 - Collaborative learning habits.

24 - MSN Messenger: unsung hero of the revolution?

25 - Blogs, Wikis and where to spend your time.

26 - Social Media Fatigue.

27 - Building trust and collaborating in online spaces.

28 - Privacy in communities of practice.

29 - How influential are you in the social media space?

30 - The idle social network.

31 - The role and responsibility of social media in the London riots.

32 - Motivation and engagement in online communities.

33 - The medium and the message.

34 - The art of graffiti.

35 - Less bean bags and no suits.

36 - Generations.

37 - Social learning in the formal space.

38 - The hazards of social media.

39 - Building your social capital.

40 - Working nine to five?

41 - Why do we join online communities?

42 - Seeing eye to eye.

43 - What to do in New York?

44 - Utilising social spaces in learning.

45 - Freedom of speech.

46 - Social media mistakes.

47 - How Facebook works to redefine social interactions.

Summary

Acknowledgements

Appendix

Contact Me

Introduction

The world has become a complex place. The old divide between formal workspaces and informal social ones is largely gone, even though both organisations and individuals fail to fully appreciate it.

Social media have opened up the gateway to seamless interactivity and collaboration between learners. They have broken down the divide between ‘expert’ and ‘public’ and changed the very notion of what ‘knowledge’ is and how we use it.

This book has two goals: to explore what ‘social’ means in learning and to explore ways in which we can use this understanding to create more dynamic and engaging social learning spaces.

I’ve collected together nearly fifty articles I’ve written around social learning, with a new commentary for each exploring the subject from a range of angles, thinking about ways in which we can effectively engage in designing social learning solutions and about what drives engagement in these spaces. I also try to bring the benefit of hindsight and reflection. Sometimes I agree strongly with what I thought at the time, whilst in other places I can see how my thinking has evolved, occasionally with greater complexity, but best of all, when it’s simplified.

For each area, I’ve tried to identify practical tips: things for you to do for yourself or your organisation, around the creation of social learning spaces and around your own confidence and ability in engaging and managing them.

Whenever we look at social learning, there are common themes: our motivations to engage, issues of controlling the message, ownership and responsibility, layers of interaction and the notion of social capital.

Social layers are being built up around all types of workplace activities: around induction, skills training, leadership, coaching and mentoring for starters. It’s not a question of whether the conversations take place; it’s a question of whether we want to be involved in them as they happen.

Social Learning: the basics

We used to live in two worlds: the workplace, a formal and restricted environment, typified by moderated messages and codified behaviours that fitted within defined parameters of acceptable, and then the social world, which was unrestricted and expressive, ranging from conversations in the pub to heated debates about politics, religion and which cocktail to order next. These two worlds used to be separate, colliding only at moments of misjudged intra-office relationships and the alcohol-fuelled miscommunication of the office Christmas party.

But no more. There is no formal and social divide. We inhabit a grey space of social, where people answer office emails from the bath and use Facebook in meetings. That photograph of the holiday in Ibiza will haunt you in your next job interview and the post about how much you hate your boss has just gone global thanks to a misjudged retweet.

But what does social mean for learning? To put it simply, it’s an incredible opportunity to engage, in parallel with incredible potential to misjudge things. When we get it right, creating social spaces for learning, supporting individuals and groups in the right way creates spaces that are challenging and supportive, productive and dynamic. When we get it wrong, we produce wastelands of derelict hyperlinks and gated communities of stultified guidance and rules.

The one thing we can be sure of is that people love social interactions, but that we look for different things in our informal interactions to our formal ones. The worlds may have collided, but we still differentiate how we behave in different contexts. The conversations that we have on Facebook differ from the interactions on LinkedIn or in a learning forum. Whilst our worlds have become more transparent, we have become better at adapting our tone of voice to suit different situations.

About me

I started out volunteering in museums at the age of twelve, doing every job imaginable, from conserving artefacts and cataloguing collections, through designing exhibitions, and into giving guided tours and working with school groups. The first museum I worked at was the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum, a sixty acre site where medieval buildings have been gathered together and preserved. This gave me the opportunity to work with horses, to run a watermill, to go charcoal burning and to work in the smithy, all the while being alongside and interacting with visitors. Sometimes those interactions were structured in demonstrations and guided tours, whilst at others they were reactive and responsive.

I loved the opportunities to work with stories, to meet people, to walk with them along a learning journey, but I’ve also always loved the chance to explore, to flip between specialisms, to take the best bits of one discipline and see how it fits in another. I am a jack of all trades, trying to master a few.

This led me, via a conservation sciences degree with archaeology, into postgraduate research around educational theory, communication theory, psychology and design. I’m grounded in understanding how people learn, whatever the technology, and what the barriers are that can prevent them from learning.

People learn through stories, at home, at work, when we meet strangers for the first time or when we get home to a partner. It’s a way that we establish commonality, share ideas, advance knowledge and learn new things. Learning and development is largely a process of sharing specific stories with a population of learners.

Whichever delivery mechanism and environment we use, at the heart of good learning is a robust learning methodology. The learning methodology is what makes our stories effective, it’s what differentiates a defined learning experience from just something that you spend time doing. We want people to be different after they’ve completed the training. We want them to think differently, to act differently, to have different skills or to reflect on their practices. We are looking to transform what they do in quantifiable ways.

I left the world of academia to start the e-learning arm of Marton House plc, straight into the deep end of e-learning in the corporate space. Whilst the challenges of academia, museums and industry are very different, there is a commonality around how people learn and it gave me a greater insight into how that learning differs in formal and informal spaces. How do we learn at work compared to how we learn at home?

We grew Marton House to be a leading UK e-learning and blended learning provider before selling the business to a global training company, General Physics, leaving me to take on a European e-Learning Director role.

Today, I write widely in my learning blog around various aspects of learning: mainly e-learning, social learning and learning technology. I sit between learning design and learning technology, which gives me a great view of both sides. Asked recently what the most important skill was for an aspiring e-learning specialist, I replied ‘storytelling’. At heart, everything revolves around the clarity and coherence of the narrative.

[Back to Contents]

The corporate colonisation of informal space.

There’s a lot of movement within industry at the moment to populate the more informal spaces that exist on the internet. Spaces from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube are all firmly in the sights of Marketing and Comms departments and are, increasingly, used in innovative ways.

The challenge this presents is that whilst people are comfortable and familiar with how to behave and interact in formal spaces, such as over email and on the intranet, the boundaries become blurred when we move into the informal.

It’s understood that some spaces are formal, whilst others are inherently informal; or at least, it’s understood behaviourally, but not necessarily legally.

For example, most people would recognise that it’s best to be moderate in work emails. Not all people of course, and we regularly hear about individuals getting caught out with an ill-advised missive, but generally speaking we are more circumspect in work emails than we would be in personal ones.

Work emails are accepted to be formal spaces, whilst personal emails are, by their nature, owned by individuals and therefore informal spaces. Similarly, Facebook is, by its nature, an informal, social space. Or at least, it was until recently. Typically, companies see an emergent, successful communication channel and attempt to subvert it to carry the corporate message. Often this is a well-meaning, but nonetheless risky, strategy. Whilst I may be happy to sign up to the page of a musician or film star that I like, I’m less likely to sign up to business pages. More importantly, if I do, I expect it to be in an ‘informal’ way.

The risk is that individuals, and indeed organisations, are unclear about the terms of engagement we communicate under in these instances. If work email is a formal space and Facebook is an informal one, what language and ethical framework is employed when these spaces collide?

Businesses are often constructed and run on traditional ‘command and control’ frameworks, with review and signoff procedures in place before messages ‘go live’. It could take weeks to publish something to the corporate website, with Legal, Compliance and Comms teams all having their say, but within informal spaces, designed specifically to facilitate rapid publishing of user generated content, publication is instant.

Many of the clients that I work with at a strategic level are only just starting to think about how and where they set the parameters and how they moderate, react and police it, if indeed they want to or can.

Commentary: At the heart of this article was the notion that we can identify formal and informal spaces, and that behaviours differ within each one. We can see this in any learning environment: take a workshop. You have the ‘formal’ channels of the time you spend in the classroom and the handouts that you leave with, but you also have informal channels: the conversations over coffee, the time at the bar in the evening, the emails sent back to the office and the posts on Facebook complaining at yet another day spent in a stuffy and airless room watching videos of Churchill.

But why should the social channels just be used to comment, to complain?