Neil Movold's List: Learning (Social Learning, e-Learning etc.)

• It is clear that a huge number of people who have been using social media for their personal use have now recognised their value for professional use, and are also using the very same tools to address their own organisational problems – mainly because enterprise systems just don’t provide them with the functionality they require to do so. Forrester estimated this was around 47% business users in early 2011 and was likely to rise to 60% by then end of the year.

• There are two key areas where this is happening and where it is having an impact on organisational learning.

  1. Extensive use of public social media sites like YouTube, Scribd, Slideshare, Blogger, Wordpress, Wikipedia, and so on, that support the creation, sharing and commenting of content, as well as the co-creation of content, means that workers are now using similar approaches in their organisations to co-create and share their own content within their own work teams.
  2. Extensive use of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc where individuals have built a personal network of trusted friends, means that they are using similar approaches to build networks of trusted colleagues (both internally and externally), as well as power team workspaces and internal communities of practice.

• Social learning has become the latest trending concept in the learning world.
• the freedom to act and cooperate with others.
• “One current theme in the workplace and education circles is to “blend” social with the formal and structured. But social learning is not a bolted-on component of our formal educational and training programs. It is a sea change. It will disrupt institutions built upon the technology of  the printing press – all communication enterprises, including education. Yes, we have always learned and worked socially, but we have never had the power of ridiculously easy group-forming or almost zero-cost duplication of our words and images.”
• “As personal, working and learning tools are merging, more and more are “doing their own thing” in order to address their own learning and performance purposes, so we could also refer to this as  the consumerisation of learning.”

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• “Social Business” is not about technology, or about “corporate culture.” It is a socio-political historical shift that is bigger, broader and much more fascinating.

   

  A new perspective is changing how we think about society, politics, interpersonal relationships, science, government and business. New approaches are emerging. Learning and self-expression are exploding. Values are changing. Leadership is changing. The economy is changing. Change itself is changing — it is accelerating and becoming the norm.”
• “Social Learning ” is not about technology, or about “corporate culture”. It is a socio-political historical shift that is bigger, broader and much more fascinating.”
• “One current theme in the workplace and education circles is to “blend” social with the formal and structured. But social learning is not a bolted-on component of our formal educational and training programs. It is a sea change. It will disrupt institutions built upon the technology of  the printing press – all communication enterprises, including education. Yes, we have always learned and worked socially, but we have never had the power of ridiculously easy group-forming or almost zero-cost duplication of our words and images.”

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• Social learning is the lubricant of networked, collaborative work.
• self-organized (social) groups for learning and working. If work is learning, and learning is the work, then shouldn’t the workplace be structured as a learning environment?

• There is a growing demand for the ability to connect to others. It is with each other that we can make sense, and this is social. Organizations, in order to function, need to encourage social exchanges and social learning due to faster rates of business and technological changes. Social experience is adaptive by nature and a social learning mindset enables better feedback on environmental changes back to the organization.
• The Internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate on a scale as large as the printing press or the advent of written language.
• Our relationship with knowledge is changing as our work becomes more intangible and complex. Notice how most value in today’s marketplace is intangible, with Google’s multi- billion dollar valuation an example of value in non-tangible processes that could be deflated with the development of a better search algorithm. Non-physical assets comprise about 80 percent of the value of Standard & Poor’s 500 US companies in leading industries.
• The manner in which we prepare people for work is based on the Taylorist perspective that there is only one way to do a job and that the person doing the work needs to conform to job requirements [F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911]. Individual training, the core of corporate learning and development, is based on the premise that jobs are constant and those who fill them are interchangeable.
• A collective, social learning approach, on the other hand, takes the perspective that learning and work happen as groups and how the group is connected (the network) is more important than any individual node within it.
• Individual learning in organizations is basically irrelevant because work is almost never done by one person.
• Social learning is how groups work and share knowledge to become better practitioners.
• “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”.

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• A great deal has changed since the term eLearning first entered the vocabulary in 1999 and since web-based courses and modules started appearing in volume in the early 2000s. We need to rethink eLearning in light of these changes and other changes (like Social Learning) that are only now starting to impact the world of work. I'm sure most of us are aware that the major challenge for learning is no longer about 'content' or 'knowledge' (if it ever were).
• We may not have great filters for content – that's the real challenge - but there is no doubt they will arrive in the next few years. The need now is for other skills such as critical thinking and analysis skills, creative thinking and design skills, networking and collaboration skills, and, across all of these, effective 'find' skills.

• Social methods and technologies mesh much better with independent learning, where the student is at the center of the learning experience (learning on their own as opposed to be being taught). They leverage a ring of social, academic, and motivational influences on their way to the goal of knowledge acquisition.