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Social Learning?

Social learning is known by many names - social learning, collaborative learning or informal learning. For many years we considered formal training to be the only way to make people learn. Formal training required people to be present all at one location. As technologies evolved, people could remotely hear and speak to a teacher in a classroom from any location. But these options were still quite expensive. Then elearning came by and we had people making loads of self-paced courses. Somehow even this seemed insufficient after some time and people started exploring blended-learning strategies. There was a need to provide more support and information to people on-the-job. As people kept looking for new ways of teaching and learning they realized that that learning happens in other ways too. You learn when you speak to like-minded people and people sharing similar interests and professions.

During this time social networking tools came by and people found new ways of connecting with each other. Meeting and connecting with people was made so easy! Then Wikipedia emerged, discussion groups and forums were largely being used to share information and resolve on-the-job problems. Google became the largest learning resource due to its super-fast search capabilities. It was observed that when people were desperately searching for solutions and more information on subjects, they proactively searched the Internet and found all relevant resources and learned more about their subject of interest and also resolved problems with the knowledge gained.

Social networking tools gave people opportunities to connect with people sharing similar interests and professions. Groups of people sharing common interests or a profession irrespective of their geographical location are termed as communities. Now, it was possible to discuss and share knowledge and learn a lot more from the other person's experiences. This process of proactively searching for information and shaping it into a form that makes sense for a situation is termed as informal learning or personal knowledge management (PKM).

So, the best ways today of learning beyond what you receive from formal training is to reach out to others and learn from their experiences to solve real-world day-to-day problems. Experienced professionals today don't need spoon-feeding but quick solutions to problems. They are self-directed learners and are motivated to define their own learning paths and manage their learning resources using social bookmarking tools and advanced search engines.

We can leverage on social networking tools to drive social learning in our organizations. Using social learning will help people grow in their domain knowledge, problem-solving abilities and make the process of communication much faster. People will be able to create best practices, learn from sharing experiences and not waste time trying to reinvent the wheel. Eventually, it will help improve their productivity at work. The goals social learning tries to achieve are:

  • Connect people who share a common interest and provide a platform to share ideas and experiences.
  • Serve as a knowledge base for searching solutions to problems that people have already faced.
  • Sharing knowledge about specific domains among a large groups who are distributed in geographically different locations.
  • Give learners the flexibility to learn in their own means, define their own learning path and choose resources that will help them learn more.
  • Keep learners constantly motivated as they share and exchange information and get recognized for their knowledge and contribution to the community.
It is also important to know that it takes a while to adopt and change your working style and use social learning as part of your regular job. Also, understanding the mental process of learning in case of social learning is an interesting study and the article on when we should collaborate on the Anecdote site is really an interesting read. Following this you may have more questions on implementing collaborative learning in organizations and measuring the benefits of social learning.

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