Social learning ramblings

UPDATE: Check out this post about businesses becoming more open.

Just some ramblings . . . 

• If you are going to provide tools that enable your employees to talk to each other and the wider world then you are going to have to trust them. 
• Communication underpins knowledge sharing and collaboration so if you want employees to do this online you will have to accept that you you and your colleagues will be able to see their dialogue.
• Organisations that trust their employees are likely to be more open and have a stronger relationships at manager level (between managers and managers and their teams)
• Social learning cannot succeed in command and control organisations (where control = lack of trust in employees)
• Learning takes place at all levels in a successful organisation - as organisations themselves are constantly learning (or should be).

Build a learning management system, but will they come?

Good post on the E-learning 24/7 blog looking at how to market a new learning system - I particularly like the rule - Don't call it a learning management system.

What I would add to this post is this: for any system to gain any kind of traction you need to be aware of the barriers to engagement, especially if you previously had an underused LMS.

Factor in the fact that any system is there to enable and facilitate learning so really must have the user at the heart of it. To do this, you need to ensure that you do your homework.

1. Research the potential users - what do they ewant, how would they use such a system and how did previous iterations fail. Segment user types to get as full a picture as you can - this should be ongoing
2. Research the stakeholders - what are the business goals for this system, what will success look like and how will this be measured.
3. Create user personas - imaginary (but based on reality) profiles of typical user types which look at overview of who that person is job role, tasks etc, look at user goals fro LMS and look at business goals - what that person is trying to achieve in their role. Also provide some general info - hobbies, online activity etc
4. Design the system but include users in the process - take users from the research as they are likely to be more enagaged
5. Design . . . test . . . build  . . . test . . . and keep challenging your assumptions. And ensure you socialise your developments to your users so they get sight of developments and can provide a useful feedback loop.

How to ensure an elearning project fails

Great article on Training Zone (need to log in) by Laura Overton, director of Towards Maturity, on how to ensure your elearning project fails. The main tips for what not to do are:

1. Take advantage of preconceived ideas (mandate it and make it boring)
2. Isolate your learner Keep your focus on your priorities – the technology
3. Put elearning design in the hands of the right people 
4. Don’t engaging stakeholders too soon 
5. Focus on cutting cost
6. Make sure that the solution cannot scale

Top 125 elearning posts for 2009

Don't you just love lists? I do, and here is a useful one of the top elearning posts for last year courtesy of elearninglearning. [H/T @richchetwynd]

Bootsy Collins launches Funk University

Yep, the funk legend has launched an online learning programme.

Context and the 4 Cs of corporate learning

Great post over at VMG looking at the 4 Cs of corporate learning: control, content, collaboration, context.

Particularly worth noting what John Hathaway has to say about context . . . and I quote in full here:

Providing context for the learner has become the most important element in a growing majority of learning and performance initiatives. Unfortunately, it’s also the one at which learning professionals usually do the worst job. I see examples every day of companies with LMSs and portals overflowing with content and learners who have no idea where to start.

In the internal corporate training world we approach this problem by doing things like aligning content to job roles and competency models. Maybe this is a good place to start when we control those job roles and hire to those competencies, but this gets shaky in the partner world and totally breaks down when we’re talking about customers.

Taxonomies, user generated tags, ratings, reviews, personalized recommendations: all of these things help, but few of these features appear in the systems currently used to manage learning. (Or, if they appear, it’s often in a bolted-on, check-the-box kind of implementation rather than truly integrated throughout the system.)

Providing this element of context needs to be a major focus for innovation in the learning and performance improvement world. There are some early consumer-focused Web 3.0 products that are starting to point the way. I’m pretty excited by how we can take those ideas and apply them to learning.

I'm sure this chimes with many organisations - there is plenty of content, much of which has been produced at a price, which employees simply do not know is there and do not know how to access it.

We had a great example in our business. The IS team kept a list of free software available to the business - which included really useful tools - but did not publicise this fact. Once we learned of the list we put on one of our informal training sessions about the list and followed up with a post on our internal blog.

Links: social learning in the workplace

There have been some interesting posts on this topic recently (I have included one of mine BTW so I'll let you be the judge of how interesting it is) so I thought I would pull them together here. 

• If elearning is still not seen as effective how will social learning take off?
• Why go beyond e-learning? 
• How social learning also enables antisocial or asocial learning 
• Is The Key To Social Learning in The ‘Social’ not The ‘Learning’? 
• Is social learning team learning?

25 e-learning and education start-ups worth following

Interesting list of e-learning start-ups. [H/T @nyx87]

100 ways to use social learning in the classroom

Great list here.

[H/T Oldshep]