10 Steps for Working Smarter with Social Media — from the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies by Jane Hart
Webinar for Learning & Skills Group, 17 March 2010

Excerpt below:

10 Steps for Working Smarter with Social Media
Webinar for Learning & Skills Group,  17 March 2010

Workplace Learning is changing!

 

A number of people, my Internet Time Alliance (ITA) colleague Charles Jennings in particular, have highlighted the fact that  training that simply involves filling people’s heads with knowledge, is ineffective and inefficient – as most people forget what they have learnt very quickly.  And that online courses, which do pretty much the same, take time, effort and money to develop.

 

Many are also “over-engineered” solutions – and this often leads to resentment by those who have to spend time to work through courses – when the material could have been provided in a much simpler way. But in fact this whole approach to workplace learning is not sustainable in a world that is moving very fast and where there is need for access to constantly changing information.

 

On the other hand, although we have now realized – due largely to the work of (my ITA colleague) Jay Cross – that most of an individual’s “real” learning takes place outside formal learning .. continuously … in the workflow … by reading or listening to things, or more significantly in conversations and interactions with other people, L&D have struggled to understand how to harness informal learning, and perhaps understandably often try to force it into the formal model they feel comfortable with it.

 

But it is in fact, the emergence of social media, that has really begun to make us think differently about the way work and learning is happening.  For an increasing number of individuals and groups are using these new technologies in the workplace to  connect with colleagues both inside and outside the organisation in order to share ideas, resources and experiences – often under the radar of IT and L&D.   This use of social media has become a revolution in the sense that these tools are now in the hands of the employees.  So the question is what role does L&D play in all this?

 

One key thing to remember is Learning is not the end goal; but is a means to an end.  It’s about PERFORMANCE; people doing their jobs (better).  In fact it’s all about working smarter.  So what is working smarter?

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