Making social learning practical: the LOSmakers event

Past Friday we organised the presentation of a book called 'Because it works'. It is a collaborative effort by the LOSmakers, a group of 15 professionals passionate about the new potential offered by social media to stimulate social learning. The book is full of practice cases and can be downloaded here. It is in Dutch but we are thinking about the English translation and already working on translating two cases. We offered it online as a free download and it has already been downloaded more than 15.000 times!

It was not a traditional bookpresentation, but rather a workshop in which people worked on their own cases of situation in which they want to stimuate social learning through social media. In small groups they chose a case, formulated important questions and with those questions went shopping on the market with experiences. They could also call in the help of Twittercoaches. One group chose as a topic: what can you do as a learning professional with few means to support learning in small groups? In the video she talks about their insights (in Dutch). 

Let me help the non-Dutchies: She talks about 4 important insights they gained from the market and the twittercoaches:

1. Make use of known tooling, for instance Twitter or Yammer in organization where there are experiences with Yammer. You avoid heavy investments in tools and for the participants there is also no learning curve for the use of the tool. 
2. In case you have a group with little experience with social media: use social media in simple and accessible ways to share teasers. For instance by sending them an interesting video upfront. 
3. Make clear agreements about the facilitation and your availability. Avoid that people expect an immediate response in the evening or weekends. .
4. Make sure you know your participants. Find the right mix between participants, tooling and the dynamics you want to stimulate. Make sure this is the basis for your plan.

You can find the storify of the event here. With regards to our twitter backchannel we had a nice mix of planned and spontaneous interaction. We had asked 3 people who could not participate whether they would like to be twitter coaches so they were available (in the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal respectively!) and reacted to questions from the groups. One of the participants working in higher education tweeted about the idea of starting a facebook group for the first year student and one of the students following her tweeted back and it was a cool idea but would be best to have students as administrators.

In which ways do you use social media for your own learning?

I met Niel van Meeuwen some time ago when we talked about using social media in learning trajectories. He already mentioned his talk in Lissabon during the Eapril conference. His presentation was last Friday and he experimented with a Twitter backchannel. Unfortunately because people there might not have been on Twitter, it worked mainly to get input from outside the conference into the conference. Very curious to hear his reflection on how it went. I'm going to summarize the outsiders input.

Question Niel put on Twitter is: in which way do you use social media in your own learning or the learning of others?

Answers on twitter:

• It mostly helps me to link to new, unexpected thoughts, people, websites.
• Personally I use social media all the time for personal learning- blog, twitter, social bookmarking key
• Learning takes place at the edges social media help me to stretch these
• I'm using twitter to learn practical things for the company I started this yr (zzp). E.g. I ask: do I have to 1/2
• Learning sometimes happens at moments I least expect it
• Those unexpected learning moments appears to be the most valuable ones.
• I use socialmedia to find relevant info and knowledge on my profession and to brand myself in my network
• Insure my business. And if yes: how? Or: how do I do taxes? I have à lot of followers and I ask them to RT
• Social media keep my son away from learning math and grammar. But he learns a lot there (although I'm not allowed to witness that!
• I also use twitter and linkedin to collect and store insights and ideas I have. It is a way of collecting thoughts and ideas
• Usually get good answers. The more practical the question is, the more answers you get frm people. Twitter=HandsOn
• Social media is a way of sharing what my passion and interest is. I get invited for cool projects based on what I share on linkedin
• I learn a lot in groups; not only real life groups but virtual groups as well
• Wonderful things happen on #LinkedIn and #Twitter; people send me wonderful, interesting and valuable info, ideas and so on
• SocialMedia make me learn about things I didn't even know I could learn about
• Social media make learning really fast and individual
• I share knowledge and get a lot of serieus response. Makes we wiser!
• A tweet a day keeps the email away?
• Use social media to find all kinds of blog posts, articles, video's to inspire my learning via friends and colleagues
• We use social media to connect with and get inspired by people who are also into #Talent in #Education

When reading through the list it strikes me that people are very enthousiastic and recognise participation in social media as a learning path, not as a side-something. I also meet people who don't see it as learning but as distracting. This definitely informs whether you want to devote time to it. If you see it as something distracting you from your work, it is costing time. If you see it as part of your own learning trajectory and you value it, it comes naturally to invest time.

Another thing that strikes me is the unexpected learning, the inspiration, the learning about things I didn't know I could learn about. Serendipity?

Looking forward to reading Niel's blogpost about the discussion there!

Update: here's a blogpost about a session on exactly the same topic!