There’s a lot of chatter these days about social learning, and different interpretations of what does, and what does not comprise social learning.

Here at Q2, we figure “social learning” is any kind of learning done directly from other people. While we give a nod to the reality that authors are people, and so learning from books is indeed social, what we’re concerned about is the spark that flies when minds connect reciprocally. So any situation in which there is somebody teaching and somebody learning is social. (And hey, if you send an email to your favorite author, and s/he responds, then we’ll call that social, too!)

Many folks think of online forums, or blogs, or twitter when they think about online social learning. All kinds of really great learning does indeed take place in these venues, but because it’s mostly both self-directed on the part of the learner, and informal, there’s a sense that online social learning is essentially informal learning. It is this misapprehension which gives the queasies to plenty of organizations who feel the need to have a more active hand in making sure their employees know what the org needs them to know.

Our clients incorporate social learning in structured training activities, as part of fully developed programs for new hires, for sales folks, and for professionals who need to be brought up to speed on the latest models of thought driving their industries. They do it by following up the presentation of content with roundtable discussions between learners and coaches about how this stuff applies in their day to day work. They present planning exercises, followed up by manager feedback on how the planned encounter went. They ask learners to do presentations for the benefit of their learning peers, and for the peers to present their feedback. And they track all of this varied activity online in a platform which makes it possible to tell at a glance who is proceeding well and where the program might be improved.

What’s more, once learners, coaches, managers and other stakeholders experience formal learning via forums, blogs, wikis and similar tools, they are better equipped to use these tools in more informal settings, and may even request access to them. So if you are interested in bringing informal online social learning into your organization, you might just want to start by incorporating social learning tools in your formal initiatives!

social learning informal structured

It’s happening all over the place.  Even in companies where training budgets have remained relatively intact,  longstanding respected instructor-led classroom programs are running into the brick wall of slashed travel budgets.

Assuming that a program is delivered in the classroom as the result of careful analysis about how to best transfer the information it offers, it can be a blow to be told “move it online.”  But what is a training department to do? It sort of doesn’t matter how great your classroom training is if learners can’t get to the classroom.

The good news is that there are a lot more quality tools available now than there were the last time this scenario forced training online.  For one thing, it’s no longer necessary to sacrifice interactivity.   Web meeting tools make it possible for instructors and learners to communication in real time in what comes pretty close to a real classroom scenario.

The other good news is that moving instruction to the desktop makes individual coaching a lot more doable than in the classroom situation. Learners can be given individual written assignments which are reviewed by the instructor, or by each other.

It’s possible to stretch out the time commitment, too.   When the org is not paying for travel and protracted time away from the office, a course can be structured to meet once a week for a few hours over the course of several weeks. This opens the door to exercises which interface directly with the learner’s job responsibilities, increasing the opportunities for coached application of the behaviors the program is teaching.

Of course, there are pitfalls to watch out for:

1. Carving out the time.  People who are out of town for training are perceived as otherwise occupied. People who are taking training at their desktop are perceived as “at work”.   Getting manager buy-in to free learners up for classwork is essential. It can also be helpful for learners to work from home or a coffee shop on class mornings
2. The doughnut factor.  Seriously.  One of the pleasures of travelling to another venue for training are those breaks with company-provided food. A colleague at a client once observed that the day it’s possible to hand a doughnut and a cup of coffee to learners through the screen, we’ll see a whole new level of attention to online training.   It might be worthwhile to think this through, and perhaps offer gift cards to Panera or Starbucks to be used while training, thus reinforcing the “get out of the office to take training” concept.

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Having a good discussion in one of the ASTD LinkedIn groups on what makes effective blended learning – http://tinyurl.com/yb6y886.

Here are a few off the cuff thoughts on principles that we use, stemming from best practices that we have developed.

o Fit the modality to the learning and business objective. We use all of the ones you name, but often only a subset of them depending on the requirement. For instance, we are currently training 10,000 people how to use a new time and project accounting system. Don’t use things like committees or conferences. Might, however, for a mid-level leadership program.

o Speed to Proficiency model. We generally use our S2P model which calls for three phases of the learning program: Instruction (to get the vocabulary, concept, and procedures into the noodle), Reinforce (a repetitive cycle of performance on the job, coaching, refinement; performance, coaching…), and Application – moving from formal to informal learning via performance support, communities of practice, best practice sharing, etc.

o Measure all learning activities, not just content acquisition via SCORM. (That’s why our eCampus allows us to track web meetings, discussion forums, assignments, etc.)

o Track coach behaviors too. We find the 10% of coaches don’t do their jobs in a timely fashion, which can kill the program. We use the eCampus which does this automatically, but bottom line is you gotta find a way to do it.

o Turn one off projects into replicable programs. Unless your total audience is tiny, you have to plan for scalability, and that means being able to manage hundreds or thousands of learners in small groups, tracking all the activities, and not going crazy. Don’t assume that since you have a great idea that worked for 25 people it will work for 2500.

o Use the magic question: How would I teach this material if I had all the time int he world, the proper instructor/learner ratio, the appropriate setting… Then when you have that question answered, map that design into what’s feasible using the rich variety of social and learning tools available today.

Your thoughts?

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It sounds like a great idea, and in the right circumstances, it can be. But done wrong, it can simply take us further down a rabbit trail that takes us further and further away from learning that leads to performance enhancement. Here are five critical success factors that nine years of experience in creating online social learning solutions for Fortune 500 companies suggest are important before consider before simply tacking Facebook or a wiki onto your LMS, or when thinking about integrating social media into your training solutions.

Avoid being attracted to shiny objects

If you read the forums and blogosphere, you keep seeing post after post asking about which social media are best for learning. We’re like five year olds, attracted to shiny objects. It’s not the technology, stupid!!! We’ve been down this road before when we were suckered into putting years of time and hundreds of thousands of dollars into LMS implementations and SCORM compliance – changing our focus from instruction to “content.” If content were king, then universities could all close down in favor of libraries. Content is not instruction. And an LMS – the chief disseminator of content – cannot substitute for a true learning strategy. And here’s a news flash. Adding a coffee shop where people socialize onto your library still doesn’t make it into a university. Even if the coffee shop has a great espresso machine. And bolting fancy social media onto a fancy content management system doesn’t create learning in and of itself.

Start at the end

Social learning does not equal informal learning. While some social learning is informal, much is not. So like with any other instructional design, start by asking what the business purpose is for the learning initiative, whether it’s a training problem, and what the learning objectives are. (Alternatively, at the enterprise level, identify key strategic learning initiatives for the next year, etc.) Drill down into the audience characteristics, mapping them against principles of technology availability, organizational culture, and online social dynamics. Use these data to determine whether the time is right to begin to introduce social media into your learning organization.

Ask the magic question

We know how to deliver good training. We’ve done it for years. And shame on us for now doing it now, because most eLearning replicates the worst practices of education online - lecture and multiple choice tests. And rapid eLearning lets us do it faster, and make even longer boring page turners! Shame on us!

When we design social learning interventions, we start by asking the magic question: Given the right setting, the right amount of seat time, the right class size, the right number of instructors, and the right resources, how would we design our training? How would we weave together presentations, individual exercises, small group discussions, case studies, individual or group projects, simulations, seminar-type discussions, games, etc. into our training event? What would we do prior to that event to prepare people? How much of that “seat time” would we devote to post-event coaching, mentoring, stretch assignments, action plans, communities of practice, or other on-the-job reinforcement activities?

The promise of social media – when used appropriately – is that we can enhance and extend the best practices of face-to-face instruction to audiences distributed across the city or across the globe. And I believe this because for me this is not a theoretical statement – our customers have documented hundreds of millions of dollars they have saved or made using interventions designed in this fashion.

The key is focusing on designing the right learning process, not on acquiring a shiny new technology.

A seamless learner experience is critical

Think about Disney World. Like it or hate it, everything you see, hear, taste and smell is part of one unified experience. The “cast members” never take off their costumes in public to smoke a cigarette, litter doesn’t stay on the broad, inviting walkways, fireworks light up the night sky – everything points to family, fun, safe, magical…

We’ve found that it’s important to provide a social learning platform that provides a similar integrated experience in several respects. Whether the learner is launching a SCORM package or adding a page to a wiki, looking for a course or locating an expert, content and collaboration should provide the same experience.

• A single sign-on and the same branding and colors are no brainers.
• The location and labeling of navigation controls should be identical.
• The online manual or help system should be comprehensive, and context sensitive help should function the same way everywhere.
• Profiles and search should reach throughout the system.
• The learner should see and be able to easily create links between content objects and collaboration tools whenever appropriate – that’s how learning happens.

In general, the learner should never realize that they are using tools that may have originated from different point providers (if, in fact, you choose to purchase a system that combines such tools).

Don’t kill the administrator. Please.

In a similar way, an effective integration of social media with learning management provides a single point of administration for the learning professional.

Users should not only be registered in one place, but permissions should be able to be set in one place as well.
The administrative interface should be identical for the learning management and social media portions of the platform.
Content libraries should be accessible throughout the platform (i.e., referenced from a wiki a well as displayed as a folder)

But to be effective, social media must map to social structures in the real world. This means long-term bodies as well as quick-forming quick-dissolving teams, informal networks as well as hierarchical groups. Your platform must have the ability to allow individual collaboration tools to support role-based management, with groups of people being given roles to multiple tools with one operation, and different levels of permissions available (i.e. guest, participant, facilitator, administrator).

In addition, to replicate the best practices of education effectively using social media, instructors should be able to quickly create learning maps that combine content, assignments, webinars, asynchronous discussions, and the like. There should be a role for coaches as well as the learners’ managers in these activities, so that (for instance) to be considered complete, an assignment must be approved by a coach or a manager. To be effective, dependencies between activities should be supported, as well as email pings for learners, coaches, and managers.

Measure social learning

For all too long we’ve been simply measuring what’s easiest to measure – the equivalent of electronic “butts in seats” – completion of eLearning modules. So if a person saves a company 55 minutes of time by finding the answer after 5 minutes of watching an eLearning course, he is seen as “not complete.” And – again- shame on us! It needs to stop now.

As you look at integrating social media into your LMS, ask questions such as:

Does the system report on social media usage (number of posts, etc.)
Does the system report on completion of social learning activities in learning maps, i.e., coaching sessions, work samples, webinar attendance)
Is the reporting of social learning integrated and presented in the same way as reporting of content learning?

Conclusion

People like to learn from people. We’ve been doing it this way for 20,000 years or so, and we’re pretty used to it. As learning professionals, we’ve allowed ourselves to get away from it a little bit too much over the last decade or so, but now the new social media technologies offer the promise of allowing us to get back to basics, to get back to what works, and to focus once again on letting people learn from people.

But we have to keep the focus on the people, and on the learning – and only THEN find the technology that will be most appropriate for the job. We can’t just find the newest, neatest, shiniest object and bolt it on to our LMS. That way lies madness.

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Please excuse us while we move the blog to our new wordpress platform!

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Much of the Web 2.0 phenomenon has featured applications which are “people-centered.” Ning, Facebook, Twitter and others feature interfaces which center around individuals, and branch out from there. I’ve written in this space before about my concerns that people-centered interfaces present some unfortunate limits to application utility, so it will unlikely surprise anyone that I’m deeply interested in how people find ways to work around these limitations.

I watched Evan Williams of Twitter give his TED talk recently, and was struck by how this piece of the puzzle has evolved.

Twitter started life as a way for people to broadcast to people who are interested in them the answer to the question “what are you doing?”

Thousands flocked to this little app, sharing with their public answers like “Eating breakfast,” “attending lecture,” “procrastinating.”

An early critique of this service was that it commanded attention to the trivial – there are very few people in the world whose breakfast-eating habits most of us could care about at all. I have stopped following people who clearly are mostly posting updates with their most intimate friends as their primary audience, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Early on, it became clear that for those using twitter as a personal account broadcasting to the entire audience of followers is not completely satisfactory. Broadcasting is nice, but people like to have conversations with each other. Users developed the “@” convention, by which they could direct their statements to other users. Latecomers to twitter sometimes think the “@” makes for private communication – it does not, it just signals when there is a particular target for a comment. But that’s useful, not just for the target, but for the rest of us who might otherwise wonder why a message doesn’t make a lot of sense to us.

Along came Summize, which created a searchable database of all tweets (and was later acquired by Twitter.) Search adds a vast new dimension of usability to all this seemingly trivial information – as the shoe company Zappos has famously demonstrated by searching for tweets which express dissatisfaction with their products or service and contacting those customers directly.

What I find really interesting is the user base response to a search interface which is represented by the “hash tag”. Now that we have search in twitter, users have developed a folksonomy of these tags, permitting the gathering of all tweets around a subject, be that gasoline availability in Atlanta or reviews of a lecture.

Yes, people are fascinated with each other. And they like to talk about themselves. But it’s very hard to sustain a conversation, let alone a relationship, around self-reportage. We like to observe the wider world and make sense of it with one another. My bet is that it is this capacity to search on subjects of interest, and find others who share those interests, will prove to be critical to twitter’s growth and ultimate sustainability. Though it seems most folks will find that they’ll want to continue those conversations in venues which permit more than 140 characters to a single expression, which is why we’ll keep seeing tweets with those tiny and bit.ly url links to where the discussion is really happening…

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The Wall Street Journal is famous for being one of the few newspapers to have successfully charged for online content from the very beginning of their web presence.  I can recall downloading the personal journal over a dial-up line back in the early 90’s, and still, even in now, in 2008, when mountains of decent financial writing is available for free, the good stuff at http://wsj.com commands a premium behind a subscriber wall. Clearly, these folks know something about about providing value on the web.

So I was interested to see how WSJ’s new social networking space, Journal Community, launched in mid-September, is faring. One of the choices they’ve made which I thought sounded very promising is the requirement that members participate under their real names. Holding users personally accountable for their behavior generally greatly increases the quality of contributions. This policy also tends to inhibit users from saying anything that their families or employers might find objectionable, so it tends to be a tradeoff between quantity and quality.

Journal Community is attractive. It’s got a nice, clean look, a bit like  the spaces at Ning.com, but without the clutter.  Creating a profile is straightforward process, and gratifyingly, many members have chosen to upload either a photo or an avatar, so discussions with activity look invitingly full of real people.

Sadly though, this initiative is off to a very slow start. The “Featured groups” include one called outdoorbase, which has but 1 member and no topics for discussion.  Information Technology, the other featured group, on the other hand, has garnered 281 members, 3 topics of discussion, 1 with no replies, 1 with a single reply, and another with 10.  Apparently, WSJ has not seen fit to staff even featured groups with hosts who might goose the conversation along by making sure that first responders don’t feel as if they are alone in a room. The guy who is “owner” for the conversation with 10 replies, which took off on its own, waltzed in over a week after the first post and offered as his contribution a “welcome” post which did not acknowledge any of the prior contributions

A topic called “What is your impression of the Journal Community?” is located, oddly, in the discussion category, garnered exactly one post back in mid-September, which is 14 days ago by this writing, and has received not a single reply, not even from “John Moderator” the discussion’s owner, which suggests that there has not been a staff member assigned to this discussion. Kind of odd, since this sort of feedback would be valuable.

Part of the problem is that there are 187 groups, all with multiple discussions, to choose from. It’s hard NOT to have the Second Life effect (whole lotta space, not a lot of people in it) when the landscape is so broad from the very beginning.  It’s difficult for moderators to cover such a landscape, especially if staffing is lean to begin with.

It’s surprising WSJ would make such an error, as they are not new to discussion forums. http://forums.wsj.com is thriving—it has discussions going back to September 2006. Today’s Question of the Day “Should the House have approved the $700 Billion Bailout plan has 206 replies at midday, and last Tuesday’s question “Should Obama and McCain debate Friday evening?” garnered 1393 replies.

Of course moving users into the new space is part of their challenge. I note that the “Are you looking for the Forums?” question which used to inhabit the community home page has disappeared, as have other links to the forum site.  But if they hope to shepherd folks into the new space, they really need to organize a welcoming committee.

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A recent Wall Street Journal  article offers this perky teaser for an article by Kelly Spors:

Use Social Media to Bond With Consumers Social-media technologies can help small firms to better connect with and market themselves to consumers and others in their industries, and they’re often free.

Spors’ article is a decent survey of current tools, including Twitter, Ning, Facebook and MySpace, with some examples of how different businesses are using them. But it is, as most such articles are, pretty light on examples of proven boosts to profitability from such efforts.

This is, of course, why businesses are being slow to adopt these tools. It’s very nice to have 800 followers on Twitter,  but the time it takes to create that following is anything but free, and in the end, the goal is to create and retain customers, not “followers” — to improve the effectiveness of collaboration with colleagues, not just create a large number of “connections.”

The new tools make it possible to cheaply broadcast an organization’s voice all over the place.  Actually connecting with people, however, requires time and attention on all sides of the communication.  That I take the time to carefully craft this blog post does not guarantee that it will have any particular utility for you, my valued reader.  That you find it valuable may raise the esteem in which you hold me and/or my organization, but that’s a pretty long way from your signing a hefty contract to secure the services of my fine employer.

There is real value, measurable in dollars, to be gained from using these tools. But even when the tool is free, there are real costs in spending the time up front to determine the suitability of the tool for the task to which it is being put, and to evaluating on the back end whether the implementation of a new tool is in fact creating the anticipated value.  There is no free lunch. But there are some pretty great meals for those willing to make a reasonable investment.

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I have this nifty macbook pro laptop which I bought a couple of years ago. Like each machine I have loved, this one has quickly filled up. It started warning me about this state of affairs in January. I was able to get rid of some stuff and keep it happy for a while, but by last month, the low hanging fruit had all been tossed.  It was time to upgrade.

A quick googling around assured me that I could indeed replace my 100 gig hard drive with one three times as big. Cool! But also, that this process is sort of involved, a lot more involved than hard disk replacement on a macbook, or on my old Toshiba, in which basically all you had to do was take out a screw or two, give a yank, and push the new one in.  No, for the macbook pro, you have to loosen a dozen some screws, remove the keyboard, and get right down into the guts of the machine.

So I thought well, ok, maybe I need to entrust this job to a professional. But calling around, the pros who were willing to do it are all 40 minutes to an hour away, and would require me to leave my precious machine in their custody for several days.  They’d charge from $80 to $150 to do the labor, which is reasonable for a fairly involved bit of surgery, but none of them stock the new 320 gig drive, just the 250 gig size.

Well, shoot. Back to the drawing board. Or Google. Which sent me to Other World Computing where not only do they sell the parts I’m looking for, but they publish installation VIDEOS in which an affable, knowledgeable, calm repair guy performs the replacement procedure and talks the viewer through it.

I watched the video, and decided that yes, even though I’d botched a similar surgery on my trusty old Toshiba laptop a coupla years ago (In attempting to replace the fan, I sliced through fan wires. Not good. Note that the macbook dates from shortly after this adventure!) with the guidance of the nice guy in the video, I could do this.

So I placed my order with the other world folks. The parts came, I set up a workspace in front of my desktop screen, cued up the video, and went to work. The difference between this experience and the Toshiba one was significant. With the Toshiba, I had the help of some excellent web pages with still photos.  But to be able to hear the sound the keyboard should make when it comes up, and to watch the tech struggle a bit to wiggle the disk into place conferred subtle but important information which would have been really difficult to communicate textually, or even with still photography.

The video was very basic. Production values were Spartan. Clear audio, clear video, and the calm, confident voice of the narrator were the primary ingredients. That OWC did not edit down the portions which took longer to do than they probably should have helped, too. It gave me confidence pre-purchase that I was seeing a real person doing a real task, in which complications sometimes arise, and more confidence as I re-watched while doing the task, that the difficulties were easily surmountable. And indeed they were.  Half an hour later, I was merrily performing a disk restore to my newly capacious machine.

I’m sure I am not the only person who has made a purchase based on the availability of online training for the task I needed to do. Of course, it’s a little easier, when selling parts, to imagine with some certainty what the learning needs of your public might be.

It makes me wonder, though, what percentage of the training programs we e-learning providers are offering hit that sweet spot, effectively teaching exactly what learners need to know, in a way which permits them to immediately and effectively apply that learning?

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