Posts Tagged ‘Social Learning’

Top Ten Posts for 2012

Posted: January 3, 2013 in Blogging
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Top 10 ListBelow are the most viewed posts on this blog during 2012.  If you missed one of them or have long since forgotten what it was about, check it out.  Most are quick lessons learned of 366 words or less (the exceptions being #2 and #9 – both posts from 2011 that still were among the most viewed in 2012).

1. Be There: Giving full attention to the people you are with and not being distracted by technology or anything else.

2. Trust: The importance of trust between people, and implications if trust is broken, especially in relationships at work.

3. Sometimes All It Takes Is 20 Seconds: Inspired by the movie We Bought a Zoo, thoughts about how 20 seconds of insane courage can change your life.

4. Companies Need Customer Service Like Granny Provides: Based on my regular experiences with a sweet, old lady when I donate blood at the Red Cross, this is what customer service should be like.

5. You Need Someone At Work To Relate To: Being the only person at your business doing your type of work can be very lonely.  Having one other person to relate to can help tremendously.

6. Kisses Are Priceless: From Valentine’s Day, 2012, read about two unexpected kisses, how they made my day and why kisses are priceless.

7. Exhaustion Can Hurt So Good: After an extreme Muddy Fanatic race with good friends, the mind and spirit can be so satisfied even if the body is spent.

8. Don’t Pre-Judge: Whether dealing with people or animals, you can easily make wrong assumptions and treat others differently if you pre-judge them.

9. More Questions Than Answers: Still-unanswered questions from 2011 regarding social learning and the use of social media in learning.

10. Evil Is Real, and So Is the Cure: Reflections following the tragic elementary school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut from my Christian worldview.

Thanks to all the readers who made these the most read.  I look forward to seeing what interests you this year.

Leap Year Lesson #273: Do. Learn. Repeat.

Posted: September 29, 2012 in Learning
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For most of my adult life, I was in some learning-related role.  From being a minister of education at a church to teaching computer classes to serving as a learning consultant, that world is very familiar to me.  Now that I have been out of a professional learning role for the past three years, my perspective on learning has changed.

I will always be a lifelong learner.  I can’t imagine otherwise.  What I have become increasingly convinced of over the past three years, however, is that how learning happens in real life is very different than how many learning professionals think it happens.

It has been my experience that learning professionals – at least in corporate America – think formal classroom learning is critical for workers.  If you analyze the budgets of learning areas in businesses, I strongly suspect that you will see the majority devoted to salaries of people who are expected to spend their time preparing and delivering formal training, or for those who develop e-learning modules that are rarely more than glorified PowerPoint presentations that most learners dread paging through.

Ask the workers how they best learn and how they actually did learn most of what they needed to know to do their jobs, and I guarantee you the answer won’t be “in formal classroom training and e-learning modules.”  They will answer with things like asking their coworkers, learning on the job, working with a mentor, job shadowing someone, self-study, and Googling questions.  Workers have a need to learn at the point and time of need.  Formal, periodic, out-of-the-way and inconvenient solutions are not viable options.

It’s past time for business leaders to insist that their learning departments shift resources to supporting learning in the workflow of employees’ daily tasks.  Most learning happens informally.  Most learning happens socially.  Learning resources need to shift in favor of what helps workers when and where they need performance support.  Make it easier for workers to connect and learn anytime, anywhere (think social and mobile), and the business will benefit.

Learning efforts need to change to reflect the pattern learning follows, a pattern summarized in leap year lesson #273 – Do. Learn. Repeat.

Leap Year Lesson #145: Social Media Brings the World To You

Posted: May 31, 2012 in Social Media
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As pervasive as social media is today, a majority of the people on earth still don’t use it.  That’s hard to imagine for some of us whose work lives and much of personal lives seem to revolve around it, but it’s true.  Facebook’s nearly 1 billion users is a genuinely impressive number, but so is the 6 billion not using it.

Some don’t use social media because they do not have access to it.  They are in underdeveloped countries without the technology, or they don’t have the personal resources to spend what it takes to be online, or their countries don’t allow them to use it, or their lives are following paths and work and pursuits that have no need for it, or – gasp – they just choose not to even though they have the access and means to do so.

It is the last group – the ones who choose not to use it – to whom I plead they reconsider.  For them to do so requires that we address the “What’s in it for me?” question they may well have.

The overly simplistic graphic I created above shows in the smaller blue circles the world of relationships and connections in which most people on earth live.  It consists of friends, family, coworkers and others we know or have access to through various direct or indirect channels.  The small blue circles describe the connections for the shepherd in a field, the leader of a tribe, the worker on an assembly line, the knowledge worker or the president of a country.

If one chooses, however, to take advantage of the world of social media, then the potential for personal connections, information, knowledge exchange and extending your own influence literally has no earthly boundary, at least among others who also choose to extend their world through social media.

Why would anyone choose less knowledge, less information, less influence, less efficiency, fewer contacts, and a host of other less-than-optimal resources when so much more is just waiting for them on the other side of a keyboard?

I wish more were excited about the reality of and the possibilities that come from leap year lesson #145 – Social media brings the world to you.

Leap Year Lesson #69: Twitter is the Most Important Learning Resource on the Planet

Posted: March 10, 2012 in Learning, Social Learning, Social Media & Learning
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For the past year I have been telling people that I learn more from Twitter than from any other resource. The reason is because of the insightful comments and the host of links to other resources like articles, blogs, reports, videos, research, etc. Most of the learning isn’t in the 140 characters themselves, but in what they point to.

For this to work, you need to follow insightful people who can point you to resources you would never discover on your own. Start with a few key people and gradually increase the number of people you follow. Follow some of the people they follow. Create lists of followers grouped by some topic area that binds them together, and focus on reading the tweets on a list if time doesn’t allow for reading everything.

What brings me to the lesson for today is my experience the past two days at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. The most valuable thing in the goodie bag given us at registration was a little pocket guide of all the sessions scheduled. Every session has printed in the guide the twitter hashtag for the session. For example, the hashtag for the session “Your Brain on Multitasking” was #SXmultitask. With dozens of sessions going on simultaneously, it is impossible to attend all you want to attend. So what do you do? Search Twitter after the session for the hashtag of the sessions you missed. I promise you will still get the main takeaways by doing this, although you certainly miss out on the detail and conversation around the topic. Still, it’s a way to attend without attending.

That is incredibly powerful, and it is fortunately becoming the norm around the globe at gatherings large and small.

If you do not yet use Twitter in this way (or at all), then you are missing out on the most powerful learning tool/resource/environment anywhere. It’s a game changer for learning and I hope so-called learning professionals “get it” and embrace it before the rest of the world passes them by as irrelevant.

Leap year lesson #69 is Twitter is the most important learning resource on the planet.

2012 – New Beginnings

Posted: January 1, 2012 in Learning, Online Communities, Social Learning, Social Media
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Like much of the rest of the world on January 1, I can’t help but reflect on the past and look forward to the future. When I think of this blog and where I’d like for it to go, there are two major things I can do to improve.

  1. Be more consistent. 16 posts in 2011 was a poor start. I can do better.
  2. Be brief. Just because I like writing a lot doesn’t mean readers always want to read long posts.

When I think about the blog I read more than any other – Rich Millington’s “The Online Community Guide” – consistency and brevity are major factors in my growing admiration of what he does there, in addition, of course, to the excellent content.

Since part of my plan for organizing my life this year involves more intentional time daily to reflect, and since it’s a leap year, I thought I would embark on 366 days of capturing brief lessons learned and documenting them here. They will most often relate to some aspect of my professional life as an online community moderator/manager and social media/social learning enthusiast. But I reserve the right to interject a few personal lessons along the way as well. So consistency this year means 366 daily posts, and just to put a number on brevity, each of the lessons will be stated in no more than 366 words (hopefully far fewer).

Join me for the adventure. Maybe we’ll learn from each other.

Happy new year!

Time to Widen the Circle

Posted: October 30, 2011 in Uncategorized
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widening circlesWhen I began this blog in April 2011 I expected to devote the space nearly exclusively to the subject of social learning. It is a topic of enormous interest to me. I am a strong advocate of it where I work. I spend way too much time pursuing the matter on my own time outside of work. In my role as community manager for our large, internal online community, I have the opportunity to promote the use of our social platform as a primary way people can share, collaborate and learn in the flow of their daily work. I could not ask for a better laboratory for social learning.

But as I ponder subjects for this blog, it is apparent that I also need to reflect on and write about other topics that may or may not always have a connection to social learning. Specifically, I want to write about community management, social media, collaboration and business practices that support or inhibit progress in the enterprise. The overall subject is still primarily social, but the details going forward will not always be about social learning.

It’s time to widen the circle. Stay with me for the journey.

The Social Media & Learning Daily

Posted: July 7, 2011 in Learning, Social Learning, Social Media, Social Media & Learning
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Social Media & Learning DailyEach day about 3pm Eastern Time a new edition of my “Social Media & Learning Daily” comes out online at http://paper.li/jeffkross/smlearning. As is the case with all “papers” at http://paper.li, it’s automatically generated from links in tweets of selected people I follow on Twitter and who I have listed on a social media and learning list at https://twitter.com/JeffKRoss/smlearning. I keep the list of contributors fairly small (currently at 37) and focused on social learning and very closely related topics.

You are welcome to visit the paper and check it out. You’ll find a subscribe button near the top right if you’d like to be notified via email daily when the new edition is available. There is also a calendar icon on the right where you can select any prior date and view a previous edition from the archives.

And don’t think that the articles initially visible are all that each edition has to offer any more than the front page of a printed newspaper contains everything it has available. A “See all articles” link near the top right will provide a full list of all articles in that day’s edition.

Time is a precious commodity for all of us. We can’t spend all the time we might like perusing tweets of trusted sources. A paper like “The Social Media & Learning Daily” can help you glean from some of the best in the field of social learning.

So check it out at http://paper.li/jeffkross/smlearning and look over the names of the people who make up the list of possible contributors at https://twitter.com/JeffKRoss/smlearning. If you want to suggest other worthy contributors, then add a comment with their name and Twitter handle and I will check them out and consider the recommendation.

Enjoy!

Book Review: “Social Media for Trainers” by Jane Bozarth

Posted: May 13, 2011 in Book Reviews
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Social Media for TrainersThose in need of information need it–and need to know how to find it–in the moment, not when the training department happens to offer it. And they have learned to find that information from one another, rather than depend on traditional, slow, inefficient, and often inaccurate top-down means. It is critical, if workplace trainers intend to remain viable and credible, that they understand how to participate in the networks and use the social media tools to extend their reach and enhance the development of the employees they are charged with developing.”

So begins the book Social Media for Trainers by Jane Bozarth. She is not one to dance around topics or to hesitate to express her opinion, afraid of stepping on anyone’s toes. In this book Bozarth combines her passion for learning and meeting learners’ needs, her knowledge of effective use of a host of social media tools, and her concern for training and development professionals and their profession to offer practical advice on leveraging such tools which she rightly recognizes to be “critical to the future of training departments.”

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Book review: “Social Learning Handbook” by Jane Hart

Posted: April 25, 2011 in Learning, Social Learning, Social Media, Social Media & Learning
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Social Learning HandbookWith the use of social media in learning by learning professionals still relatively young, there are only a handful of books written on the subject. To be honest, several of them overlap somewhat in the content provided, leaving me to ask after reading the third one in the span of a month “Do I really need another book to tell me what a wiki or a blog is about?” My answer to that is a resounding “No!” It is, therefore, with pleasure that I recommend to you Jane Hart’s Social Learning Handbook (©2011, Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies).

Several excellent attributes make this book stand out, but the two which impress me the most are (1) the enormous quantity of references scattered throughout the text which can open doors to marvelous additional exploration beyond these pages, and (2) the investment of a significant portion of the text to the bigger picture of social media and its impact on workplace learning, social training vs. social learning, and social learning strategies to implement whatever tools are ultimately selected.

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More questions than answers

Posted: April 11, 2011 in Learning, Social Learning, Social Media & Learning
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question markAs I reflect on the state of social learning and the use of social media in learning, I am well aware of the fact that I have more questions than answers. I suspect it will remain that way. Some questions will be answered in time, but they will be replaced by more questions than are answered. That’s a good thing. It makes us think and discourages any know-it-all attitude that is quite unbecoming for anyone who actually deals with real, live human beings. We can be certain that the field or discipline or whatever it should be called is dynamic not just because technology changes – that’s a given – but because the center of it all is people, and people are more complex than simplistic answers ever capture.

After about 30 years of work in adult education in a variety of contexts, and with the past 2+ years focused on informal, social learning and collaboration, I have some questions I really want to explore, such as:

  • What features and functionality (if any) are missing from today’s social media tools (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, wikis, etc.) that, if present, would improve their use and general public acceptance as tools for learning? Is the answer different for typical users vs. learning professionals? Is a learning professional the only one who would ask such a question because the typical user doesn’t make those distinctions?
  • Which learning theories are the best foundations for this journey into the future? I’m a big fan of connectivism and its primary proponents George Siemens and Stephen Downes, but you shouldn’t discuss social learning without also knowing about Albert Bandura. Is the most appropriate theory maybe one that hasn’t yet been articulated? Does learning theory matter, or is that just something else learning professionals get all knotted up about when the learner just wants to get on with his/her business?
  • When will we get past reading explanations of wikis and blogs and microblogging and get on to actually using such tools for effective learning and performance improvement? When will we see substantive case studies and research findings that convincingly demonstrate effective and ineffective use of social media in learning?
  • Will millennials really do things that differently regarding social media and learning when they inherit the keys to the corporate kingdom or will competing influences of current culture and human nature influence in the direction of the status quo for the foreseeable future?
  • What will it take to change the mindset of today’s corporate learning and development departments away from their focus on controlled, formal learning experiences to one that values in deed, time and budget the informal, social realities of how their people prefer to learn and actually do learn every day?
  • What is enduring about social learning regardless of the technology of the day? When will that be common knowledge among learning professionals and baked into how they approach their support role with those they serve?
  • What will it take to move the discussion from the extremes of “classroom training is dead” and “social media is a fad” to an ability to know the gamut of what is possible and to do what is most effective in a given situation?

Those are some of my questions. I have more and others will come that I have yet to consider. From one who cannot imagine a day without learning, I enjoy that tension of living with more questions than answers. To quote a line from KC & The Sunshine Band: “That’s the way (uh-huh, uh-huh) I like it (uh-huh, uh-huh).” Ok, that’s a little out of context, but you get the point.

people with questionsPerhaps you have other questions to add to my list. I’d like to know what they are. You are welcome to add them in a comment at the bottom of this page and to take a crack at answering these and other pertinent questions. We will learn more together than alone.

Thanks for joining me on this journey to discover next practices. As the subtitle of this blog used originally read, “today’s best practices in social learning aren’t enough for tomorrow.” I’m not sure of the final destination, but I know I’ll enjoy the ride.

If you haven’t yet checked out the other pages “Why This Blog?” and “About Jeff Ross,” I encourage you to do so.

Jeff