The Learning Strategist

I have been through this battle of encouraging people to use social media for learning and knowledge sharing. I will admit my style is subtle and not aggressive. But that's also because it doesn't work by being aggressive. What does help is empathizing with the users and their various styles of social interaction. Just because someone is not on social media sites often doesn't mean they are not social or don't want to share information. This calls for us to stop thinking run-of-the-mill. Yes, over selling social media is becoming run-of-the-mill! We need to get back to the basics and think again. I can give examples from my team of people who are collaborative by nature and achieve the same results by meeting people face-to-face or over web and video conferences. They are some of the most brilliant people in their jobs and communicate effectively. They are always happy to share their knowledge for the benefit of our team. Such people will always excel in communicati...

Instructional design provides a gamut of principles and models that enable you to train people effectively in various areas of expertise. The role of an instructional designer is essentially driven by a need to find appropriate solutions by applying instructional design strategies and models to transfer information to users who use a particular product or service to perform their jobs. Changed Learning Methods As time progressed and technologies evolved, the role of the instructional designer as we understood it several years back, underwent a paradigm shift. In spite of client demands to create conventional elearning courses, the fact is that the way people are learning today has changed phenomenally due to the increased access to social media tools and advanced mobile devices. Twitter, blogs, wikis, and discussions have become the new age learning methods. Learner's look for relevance and access information only when it is needed. The concept of reading everything that co...

The social chatting culture has been quite rampant and people seem to love an online discussion with ' tweeple ' as they are known. Or is that term old already? Today, I chanced up on lrnchat on Twitter in a time that I could attend and quite enjoyed the conversations. The dexterous manner in which planned questions for a topic were put forth and people responding with quick thoughts itself was really enjoyable and overwhelming. I think some of the key things to note in an online conversation is the spontaneity of the answers and often every one has a valid point. The answer often comes without much thought or speculation and is very instantaneous and I believe it is this quality that makes it interesting. We have similar social chats on Fridays in our organization and they're quite fun too. Such sessions give employees an outlet to express how things can be improved, what they think is important, and overall build a conversation that has a capacity to bring out what peop...

I'm quite thrilled to let all of you know that my effort to push social workplace learning in my team has been recognized. Post my queries posted in my blog post Social Learning Adoption , I have been slowly evangelizing social media tools and social learning to management at every opportunity I've had. It has been a great recognition for me the last week, when the manager of our team from the US, acknowledged my efforts and my knowledge in the domain, and included the use of social-networking to benefit our global team in my goals for the next year. I know this is a tough job, given the challenges I listed in my post, but never-the-less its an encouragement that motivates me to work at it in an organized manner. I believe I owe my knowledge and confidence to the community who willing contribute and encourage me. Getting listed in the elearninglearning site was very encouraging too and I thank Tony for it. I'd like to use this post to also answer a question one of my co-...

An excellent question for one and all, and what better opportunity to motivate me to get back to the blogging scene that I have been away from for quite long now, and so for reasons precisely related to Time Spent . Tony thanks for this excellent question! To start with I'd like to tell folks that I am quite versatile and love doing a lot of things. I live believing that after all I have only one life to do everything that I want to do, so I do not stop myself if i have an urge to do something quite new and compelling, that I would enjoy. So what do I spend my time with? Well I work on weekdays, so my commute to work and back itself takes a away a lot of my time. At work, I manage to tweet and get on FaceBook and chat with my friends and colleagues in breaks between working. These are important to me and I have linked my twitter and FaceBook accounts so the tweets are shared on FaceBook as well. But I have several friends on FaceBook (school time friends, other friends and colleagu...

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 eac...

Information isn't owned by an individual but by a community. Jane Bozarth is right in her post on Who Owns Information? Here's a fantastic video to prove it: I love the concluding lines that say 'In the past you were what you owned', 'Today you are what you share'. What do you all think?

Collaborative learning, (I prefer collaborative as it seems more like an organization thing than social) basically informal learning , is the way to go today, and yet we seem to have so many questions coming up: How can we get it to work to really bring value to the organization and the customers? How can you ensure it is used the right way? How do you ensure authenticity of information that is critical to the organizations goals? All very valid questions to ask while we are still bordering on the implementation of the collaborative learning project, and trying to measure what value it would bring after implementation. It is possible to convince management that collaborative learning would work for the good of the organization, just like brainstorming and knowledge sharing sessions did in the traditional models. The advantage here is the time saved on those meetings, and converted into information accessible through the medium of Web 2.0 resources. These resources have proven outside ...

Tony Karrer raises a valid point in his post Social Learning Measurement : eLearning Technology. Just the point I was thinking of after wanting to have a social model implemented in my own organization. It seems very interesting and attractive to have means to access information informally on-the-job and have it exactly when you need it. But I see the following challenges in the implementation of social learning at workplaces: - How do I ensure the information is organized well enough for an individual to access it when needed? The search feature has to span across all available information resources related to the subject to give me what I need. - How to ensure the authenticity of the information? We are in an organization dealing with real customers. Hence we can't take the risk to goof up based on something written in a social learning network. At a high-level I can imagine a reviewer/moderator model being implemented where all of the information entered is validated by experts...

Learning more about the world through photography, has been the motto of these websites— Trek Earth , Trek Nature and Trek Lens , that I ardently use to learn about my hobby—Photography! I think this has been a noble initiative that has been helping amateurs like me around the world learn the art and science of photography. I believe this site works, as I have seen people who initially had very regular photos and have now shown such improvement that I was amazed! The reason I choose to speak about these sites is not to advertise them, but to highlight how the whole learning process here is a collaborative one, relevant to what we all speak about in informal learning. The users of this website range from professionals to mere beginners like me, from people with the most high-end DSLRs to basic Point and Shoot versions. Whatever you use, does not deter you from posting your photos here and having people critique your work. These sites have some common features like: Regional Groupin...