The Truth About Social Learning

I just attended a one hour webinar on the truth about social learning presented by Jane Bozarth, Ph.D., (@JaneBozarth on Twitter) and provided by the Training Magazine Network. They do great things for free and would encourage you to set up a free account so you can take advantage of their resources too.

Here are the 3 most poignant take-aways:

Most learning happens socially; we just don't realize it until it's not there.
What this means is that those informal water-cooler chats, those discussions you have in the car on the long rides on I-68 and I-70, and those beer- or wine-fueled happy hour talks you enjoy with your colleagues is where the majority of learning occurs. Why is this? Because it's natural. It's organic. It's human nature. But too often, or so some may have the impression, these types of social conversations are frowned upon as a waste of company time. According to the research (references to follow), these conversations are extremely valuable to the growth and social health of the library/business/school/etc and its talent (meaning us -the employees).

If we force social learning, it'll stop or it'll go under the radar.
So, you read this post and you do some research on your own and you think, wow! Everyone should be doing this especially Colleague X who doesn't talk to anyone. Stop right there. Forcing someone to engage in social learning endeavors (i.e. mandatory water cooler chats) will not have the desired effect. Basically, if folks aren't already talking, chances aren't they aren't ever going to. This rings true with the opposite situation - you notice one day what great ideas come from a long drive home from a meeting and so you decide to make every Thursday afternoon Go-For-An-Idea-Ride time and you force your staff or colleagues into taking mandated hour-long drives in the hopes of mimicking that one experience you had. Ain't gonna happen. Moral of the story: let it be, let it become, and don't impose any structure onto it.

Social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) are just tools that help take the social learning to a bigger level.
Just because you have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc account and you have 5,000 friends, 3,000 followers, and 7,654 connections, it doesn't mean you're learning socially. It's not how big your social media network is, it's how you use it and how regularly you use it. How often have you posted a problem to your social media networks to get your friends to help you out? Have you used social media to help answer a patron's reference question when you were struggling? I used Facebook on Monday to find a new home for my dog and I did it in a matter of minutes. Minutes. You've heard of out-sourcing, right? Now start thinking about crowd-sourcing. I like to think of the idea of using social media to enhance social learning as the notion of crowd-sourced problem solving, or crowd-sourced perspective getting.

References for today's webinar can be found at: http://www.delicious.com/jbo27712/SocLrnTruth