My social learning experiences

For a long time I organizing a blog carnival was on my bucket list and I finally took the plunge. I choose the topic: my example of social learning. Why this topic? I notice that there is a lot of confusion about social learning: is social learning about learning through social media? is social learning any process in which more than two people are involved? By inviting people to blog about examples you can start a conversation what social learning is (and what not). And maybe it means different things to different people!

I am currently reading the book: How we learn by Knud Illeris - He describes three dimensions of learning:

• content
• motivation (motivation)
• the interaction (the external environment)

These three dimensions are always part of a learning process, and thus is in fact learning is always social there is no "non-social" learning. That of course makes it even more difficult and confusing. It is true, however, that the social learning movement pays more attention to the social aspects of learning than others, for instance e-learning designers. Enough theory - now my own examples. I would like to compare two of my own examples. An example of the social media era and a pre social media experience, so the difference is clearly visible.

Social learning with advisors in West Africa

A good example of what is still an inspiration to me and was a transformative experience is the community of practice of SNV's consultants in West Africa from 2000 to 2003. I worked in Sekondi-Takoradi in Ghana in an advisory team. Advisory work and working in autonomous teams was new because SNV used to carried out development projects before 2000, so this was a major shift. I had a role in coaching the team in the new way of working as consultants. About 15 people were part of the community of practice of advisors in West Africa. These were consultants who were engaged in the new consulting practice of SNV in other countries such as Benin, Mali and Cameroon. Albania was also part of it because they had no partners in Eastern - Europe. Through the exchange in the community, I began to see broader contexts, we found common threads in our experiences. I was encouraged to make a case analysis of my own team, something which led to many new insights for myself and hopefully also others. Also, we were asked for advice on strategy development. It had great impact on me because I learned a lot, felt heard for the first time in my career. I also think it brought a lot of innovations to the organization. The way we interacted was twice a year 2-3 days together. There was not much technology support, although we experimented with an email exchange in which we got a new question every hour only by mail, and a Yahoo Messenger chat. Interestingly, I still have four friends from that community whom I'm still seeing regularly.

Social learning about social learning

If we compare this experience to the way I learn currently about social learning, I notice I am currently inspired around social learning by all kinds of people but there is a less obvious group, a less obvious community with boundaries. My base is in Ennuonline where I work together with Sibrenne Wagenaar and a group around it. In addition, I was influenced enormously by a clearly defined group of people within CPsquare (CPsquare no longer exists), some of whom I also still interact with online. This is where I got my interest in social tools and first learned about LinkedIn and Flickr in 2005. This group stimulated me to start this blog too.

But actually my thinking and practice is now influenced by a huge fluid group of people whom I follow through blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook groups and MOOCs.  An example: I frequently use some of the models shared by Jane Hart in my work with clients. Important people which I always read blogs include Jane Hart, Beth Kanter, Harold Jarche, Ger Driesen and Wilfred Rubens. In addition, I add new people regularly to my radar through Twitter or feedly. Occasionally I collaboration more intensively, such as in organizing a teamhackathon or the thinktank around our book. The most powerful ways to connect are surely cooperation or engaging in conversations at a networking lunch, conference or meetup.

Social learning pre and post social media

If you compare these two examples, it is actually true that the interaction, the external environment has changed a lot. The number of people which influence me has become much larger. However, the investment, the commitment in the community in West Africa was much larger. The advantage of having a large fluid network is that you see a lot of diversity, but the pitfall is that you get less depth because it's faster and more volatile .. You probably need a bit of both. How do you organize this for yourself?

The hardest phase: the coalescing phase in communities

Image via Wikipedia

In a lot of my consultancy work I use a social learning theory- about the functioning and growth of communities of practice. Even when people don't use the term community, but online network, platform, alliance, whatever. As long as learning is one of the goals. Every consultancy is different though- I find it hard to work with blue print materials because every situation is so distinct.

I can discern a red line in my work nevertheless. It is that people tend to underestimate the social capital side of online communities or online platforms. When you look at vibrant online exchanges, it may look as simple as inviting a lot of people by email to sign up, or announcing a new initiative in other online spaces. But this frequently leads to disappointments and leaves people wondering why it works for other online communities but not for their network.

So what are the challenges in the coalescing phase (the phase which follows the first phase when initiators have come together, defined the purpose, a platform has been built and sometimes an official launch has been organised)? I like the chapter in the book Cultivating communities of practice which outlines the following challenges:

• To balance the need to develop relationships between members and trust against the need to demonstrate (practical) value
• To keep the energy level up after a big launch event when everyone goes back to 'normal business'
• To get members to share 'thorny' issues when there is not yet a high level of trust..
• To stimulate private conversations (nothing wrong with those!) yet at the same time bringing private topics into the public community space

It is not an easy phase for coordinators /facilitators but it may help if they are aware of these issues and do not underestimate the art that goes into stewarding connections and knowledge in this phase (where they may feel not enough is happening).... And if the basics are not right- you might be working against the tide.

Communities of practice in organisations: Interview with Wenger

On the learning conversations blog I found a video interview with Etienne Wenger in which he answers quite some basic questions about communities of practices in organisation. What they are, when not to foster them (they are not a panacee), how sponsorship of communities in an organisation differs from managing communities. Highlights: think about communities when there is a dynamic knowledge problem. Practitioners need to be in the lead. When there is a clear knowledge gap, just produce a manual. When there is a problem with an organisational process, don't try and solve it with a community of practice. And when there is really no-one who is passionate about the domain, forget about it too. Watch it if you have some 15 minutes and are interested in communities.

Communities of Practice from Multi Media Vision on Vimeo.

Are your community's lurkers healthy lurkers?

I facilitated a teleconference with Mirjam Neelen for CPsquare. Mirjam is doing a thesis on this topic and shared her literature research with us. It struck me how much more you dive into a topic if you have to facilitate it, you suddenly feel more responsible and really invest in the topic. I've blogged about lurking before, investigating whether lurking in online forums is a sort of legitimate peripheral participation that leads to people learning about the practices of a community of practice. This time we tried to analyze whether lurking in online forums is a problem or a bliss for companies. The definition of lurking is as people who NEVER post, hence they don't share their questions, ideas or suggestions online.

What did I learn about lurking? First, most of all recognized that lurking can be very positive. Lurking into an online forum because you feel you are a novice can make you more expert. Or scanning a wide variety of online forum to know what's happening in other fields (helps boundary crossing). Something that really struck me in Mirjam's paper was the observation by Stegbauer that if participants remained inactive for the first four months, the likelihood for them to become active was minimized. I recognized this from my own behaviour. That means there is a crucial period to try and get participants active, to stimulate active participation. Mirjam outlined a wide variety of barriers that may lead to lurking behaviour and withold members from posting:

• Interpersonal barriers- loss of face
• Procedural barriers- people don't buy into the recommended ways of sharing (could be called preferential barriers?)
  
• Technological barriers - lack of technological aptitude
• Cultural barriers- crosscultural differences

'Healthy' lurking processes are probably situation where people are novices and learn by lurking or interdisciplinary lurking. It becomes unhealthy when important information and knowledge is missed out because of the above mentioned barriers. Suppose an online community is missing out all major experts because they continue to change offline, then some bridging needs to be done to ensure the online community doesn't become marginalized and mediocre. I guess an analyisis of inbound trajectories whereby people move from lurking to being active or core members are key to seeing whether lurking is healthy. What are the community's practice to stimulate sharing of ideas and perspectives?

What did I learn about online facilitation? I made it into a sort of exercise in online facilitation for myself, designing and online-teleconference-online sequence. The idea was to collect lurker stories online, discuss the research focussing on lurking behaviour in online corporate community forums, and go back online to brainstorm about research questions. The first part worked well, but there was no energy to go back online to discuss the research questions. I think I should have changed the initial plan into a topic that might have attracted more energy for the participants of the teleconference, like research methodologies. What really paid off was to prepare it all together beforehand in a skype session. That's an investment that really pays off in terms of quality.