A tidal wave of social learning is reshaping the way we experience new information. As businesses become more globalized, people are discovering more flexible, engaging ways to make connections with each other. We're now able to cast a net into the ebbs and flows of relevant information that surrounds us. And the results are pretty amazing.
The Nature of Learning
Social learning builds a sense of community, creates standards or reference points, and offers alternative perspectives. It also generates support and encouragement within our networks.
The essence of social learning for businesses is that people collaborate and share to make sense of new ideas. In her excellent post on social learning on FastCompany.com, Marcia Connor sums it up this way: "Social learning combines social media tools with a shift in the corporate culture, a shift that encourages ongoing knowledge transfer and connects people in ways that make learning a joy." New technologies are making it possible to create vibrant working environments that are "enthusiastically supported, where your sense of wonder returns and creativity blossoms — where people thrive."
Children seem to learn through social interaction quite naturally. In days past, workers regularly learned by doing, by finding mentors and observing their behaviors. Our learning hasn't always been bound by rigid org charts and corporate seminars.
Why has the business world taken such a siloed approach to learning for so long? The explosive potential for social media has helped us improve the way we learn at work, beyond the org chart. Perhaps social media tools are letting us tap back into something fundamental to learning: a sense of curiosity and exploration.
The Tools of Social Learning
If learning is a journey, then online social learning tools allow us to leave a trail of breadcrumbs—without geographical restrictions. Here are some common tools many of us already use every day to learn and share new information:
- Wikipedia: A free content encyclopedia that anyone can edit, Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites in the world. It attracts more than 400 million visitors a month and a total of 1.2 million contributors. This is made possible by a software platform that simplifies collaboration.
- Twitter: People flock to twitter because it allows them to connect, communicate, share, and collaborate with people all over the world, as well as find the most current topics of interest. These topics can be organized using hash tags (#) for easy searchability.
- Company Blogs: External blogs let employees contribute posts and invite comments from visitors. They help build a company's brand and allow a free-flowing exchange of new ideas.
- Internal Wikis: These sites let employees share knowledge within an organization, access common files like job descriptions, style guides, policies and procedures, and browse resources created by company subject matter experts.
Social Learning Strategies at Work
Many of us are more than knee-deep in social media through sites like facebook, twitter, and pinterest. Then when we go to work, it's as if we're reverting back to how we used to communicate a decade ago. With email as the standard mode of communication at work, it's difficult to openly communicate and collaborate on projects.
Embrace social learning or be left behind, says journalist Debra Donston-Miller. Users are tired of just searching for information online; now they want to network. It's the next big step in social communication.
The opportunity for growth in the social business industry is vast. One company that has claimed a big stake in this space is Jive Software. The company's enterprise-wide social platform leverages the social graph to offers people better ways to collaborate and communicate at work without having to resort to outdated modes of communication like email. Hundreds of big-name companies have adopted the technology with incredible results.
You don't always need fancy tools for social learning to take place. For example, one of our clients needed a leadership program and a way for participants to practice applying their knowledge outside the classroom. We helped create a "lunch buddies" program to pair different individuals together for lunch following every training session over a nine-week period. They also participated in monthly cohort meetings as an opportunity to review and practice what they learned together.
Zappos.com is another company widely recognized for innovative uses of social strategies that support its customer service and culture. The company's CEO says that he views social media use as more of a communication channel than a marketing channel. Zappos encourages positive and negative feedback exchanges from customers and employees to align with the core values of openness and honestly. The company offers twitter training to employees, and more than 400 have active accounts. They post YouTube videos and manage several corporate blogs focused on culture and customer service.
Professionals are also using social learning strategies to build their own personal learning networks (PLN) to keep up to date on topics of interest. Learning expert Jane Bozarth recommends using social networking to find people you want to know, participate in interesting conversations, and expand your usual horizons. By creating your own PLN, you can create your own professional brand and build a community of those who share—or even oppose—your interests.
One obvious downside to these abundant inlets for social learning is information overload. It's something we're all learning to manage as we juggle our many devices, online accounts. As we become more social online, we must develop stronger filters to weed through the distractions and irrelevant details.
Which social learning strategies do you use at work?
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