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ATD Blog

Social Media for Informal Learning: Part 3

Thursday, December 6, 2012
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The recent proliferation of social media seems to have rekindled an interest in informal learning processes. The final installment of the article series “Social Media for Informal Learning” details principles training and development (T&D) professionals should consider when using social media for informal learning. (Part 1 and Part 2 identified types of social media that can support informal learning processes.)

Principles to Consider When Using Any Technology for Learning

When considering employing a particular technology to aid learning efforts, it is important for T&D practitioners to mull over the following issues:

  • Capabilities. What does the technology do—and is that what you need it to do? Does the need match the functionality? If not, the technology is unlikely to improve or aid learning and, therefore, probably isn’t worth another look.
  • Costs. What does it cost to not only acquire the technology and support it, but also to prepare learning and informal experiences that use that technology?
  • Time requirements. How much time is needed to design, develop, and deliver materials using that technology? Some technologies are inexpensive to acquire (especially with so many free services available online), but they can also use up a lot of time (ask social networking addicts).

Bottom line: Be sure to keep in mind practical issues when choosing any technology to use with informal learning, including social media.
“Pluses” of Social Media

Social media offer many advantages, which are widely communicated in the trade press:

Social media can reduce content development costs. Specifically, social media can reduce costs in software acquisition and content development.

  • Software acquisition: If it’s possible to use widely available tools like LinkedIn and Facebook, they’re generally free to use. Keep security issues in mind, though, if you’re using social media internally. Free software rarely offers the type of security needed to protect proprietary and personnel information.
  • Content development. “Volunteers” within the community who have topic-specific knowledge typically contribute to the creation of resources that members of that community use to strengthen their own knowledge. These volunteers—staff members, suppliers, and customers—might answer questions posed to a group, supply an article for an internal online encyclopedia, or informally share insights.

Social media supports learning among peers—without geographic limits. In many organizations, casual spaces like water coolers, lounges, cafeterias, and coffee shops lead to informal sharing of information—and some serious learning. But geography limits who can share information to people who work in the same place. Social media breaks down these barriers by providing a virtual casual space where people can have informal conversations that lead to serious learning.

Sometimes social media teaches; other times it leads workers to enlightening content. Different types of social media facilitate different types of social interactions—some emphasize short interactions, others emphasize longer ones.

For example, the primary means of communicating in microblogging (Twitter), social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn), and social bookmarking (Pinterest) is brief, either a link or a limited number of characters. As a result, they’re great for linking people to content rather than communicating complete lessons.

In contrast, blogs, wikis, and shared applications promote interactive work and the creation of longer documents that, in turn, can provide complete lessons.  

People already use social media for personal purposes. An increasing number of workers have personal social media accounts. For many, social media is how they interact with the world. Training and development professionals can leverage this connectedness and familiarity with the technology for learning purposes.  

 “Minuses” of Social Media

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Receiving less attention by the trade press—and users—are some of the questions and concerns about using social media and informal learning.

Technology is still developing. Most uses of social media for learning are still in the early stages. There is much conflicting evidence about its use as learning tools as its use in other spheres. For example, although some T&D professionals believe that social media is the future of learning, research shows that its use is not as widespread among younger adults as assumed (Freeman 2010)—much less among learning professionals (Rossett & Marshall 2010).

Furthermore, many trials using Twitter, Facebook, and blogs for learning have had mixed results. One issue that arose in many studies is the notion of sustaining interest. Students would tweet or blog at first, but did not sustain the practice. In one study, the number of tweets dropped by 75 percent between the beginning and end of a course. In another study, students were busy tweeting but, as one noted, they had no idea what they were tweeting about.

There is confusion regarding terminology. On a more basic level, much confusion exists around basic terminology for social media, just as it does for informal learning in general. For example, one common confusion is understanding the differences between blogs and wikis. Blogs are individually written pieces that clearly identify the author and individual comments. In contrast, a wiki is a collaboratively written document; the identity of individual authors is not always provided.   

If the people advocating the use of a particular social medium don’t really know what it is, how can they effectively promote its use for formal learning purposes, much less informal learning?

Not all software is appropriate for business. In general, people use Facebook for their personal and social lives, while they use LinkedIn for their professional lives. (However, many organizations want to use Facebook to reach consumers and potential members.)

This has significant implications for informal learning. In terms of promoting informal learning related to work, LinkedIn might provide better access to the proper people when they need to consider work-related issues. Meanwhile, in terms of simply using the media, some organizations ban the use of Facebook for work-related purposes. Indeed, some schools have done so to prevent inappropriate contact between teachers and students.

The issue is not whether these bans are right or wrong. As long as they formally exist in an organization, training and development professionals cannot use the banned or limited medium to facilitate informal learning.

Content is often “buyer beware” (Shank, 2008). In many cases, content created and made available to others via social media has not been reviewed by others for accuracy, completeness, and readability. Indeed, sometimes the content hasn’t even been spellchecked. In other cases, people who post to social media provide their thoughts and opinions about issues, but may not be basing them on facts—or may simply choose to ignore the facts.

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As a result, informal learners must be able to not only assess the appropriateness of content to their needs, but also need to assess the quality of the content they’re reading.

For some socially created content, like Wikipedia, the community of contributors usually (and eventually) ensures that the content eventually is accurate. For example, studies have shown that entries on Wikipedia have a similar level of accuracy to those in the well-regarded Encyclopedia Brittanica. But wikis are the only social medium that lets users correct the original content. When errors appear on blogs, Facebook updates, and other social media sites, the only way to point out the errors is to post a comment or make an update—and hope that others read it.

Participants often need etiquette lessons. Research suggests that people tend to exhibit less inhibited behavior online than in person, a tendency often reflected in online comments. These, in turn, anger other users, who respond with inflammatory comments of their own.

Some users are extremely polite—but see every group member as a prospective customer and try to steer every group conversation to a sale for themselves—even in conversations that have nothing to do with sales. In addition to annoying and offending many of the participants in the community and hampering the likelihood that informal learning might occur during discussions, these perpetual marketers defeat their own purposes. Most usually lose the sales they hoped to gain.

In the belief that anonymous comments led to this behavior, many online news and information sites now require that users register themselves with the site before they can make comments and refuse anonymous comments. Similarly, some discussion groups within social networking sites have guidelines to keep the focus on learning and networking—and off of a lot of other things. Consider the guidelines from the Technical Writer Forum on LinkedIn (see Figure 1).

Users must consider privacy of others. Although social networking connects people across departments, organizations, and other geographic boundaries, the extent of information they collect and share, as well as the encouragement to share all sorts of personal information, raises concerns about privacy.

Facebook privacy settings and guidelines for selecting who to “safely” friend on Facebook and connect with on LinkedIn have received much attention from the popular press. Similarly, the information collected and sold about users on these systems without the knowledge of those users has received much attention.  

Receiving less attention, however, are the more fundamental issues of privacy—like sharing company secrets, private personnel information, and other types of internal information. Although most organizations have policies regarding these disclosures, employees often violate them—and the casual atmosphere of social media often leaves workers with their guards down. 

To prevent such leaks, some organizations have adopted proprietary social networking software for use within the organization. Although these tools raise costs (organizations need to acquire the software, as well as install and support it), they provide safety and privacy. But they’re less familiar and less likely to receive the attention from workers as public sites—unless the organization makes a concerted effort to drive people to the proprietary social networking software.

Bottom Line

Social media—like all technologies—are just one set of tools in a complete repertoire of instruction and performance improvement solutions that training and development professionals can offer to their clients.  The challenge is to use it effectively, making sure that the situation benefits from the use of social media and that the issues that could derail its success are addressed as part of the plan for using these media. 

About the Author

Saul Carliner, PhD, CTDP, CFT, is a professor of educational technology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada; author of Training Design Basics, Informal Learning Basics, and An Overview of Training and Development: Why Training Matters (with Margaret Driscoll); and a Fellow and past board member of the Institute for Performance and Learning.

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