In Blog Cascadia Kevin Jones reports on Tony Karrer’s conference session on social learning at ASTD’s TechKnowledge conference being held in San Antonio.
The size of the conference, for those who haven’t been top an ASTD event, can be gleaned from attendance of 250 people at one of 12 concurrent sessions.
Yet only about 6 in the room admitted that they currently use social networking as a learning delivery technique. In response to a survey, most wanted to use these tools “alongside formal learning.” This implies to the source that social networking is not on the learning plan - it happens independently.
The barriers to implementation in the workplace appear to be:
- Firewalls
- IP (intellectual property)
- Privacy
- Security
- Control of information by management
- Strict control over policies – Accuracy / Liability / Discoverability / Compliance / Change Management – Ready for it / Culture
- Management take it seriously – away from work
- Is it real work or not?
- Education of management
- Lack of resources – Mobile devices
- Pushback from workforce – adoption
What about the quality of the content? That is ALMOST a non-issue. Think about it – the information is getting out now, but it is over the phone, IM, email.
END QUOTE
So chalk up advantage 1 for social networking - transparency.
Tags: adoption, networking, social learning
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March 12th, 2008 at 1:18 am
To the initial question, “Is social learning really training,” I would have to say a resounding ‘No.’ I have not only experienced, but watched others experience the pain in trying to fit social learning into a training construct. It doesn’t work. They are different, yet they do compliment each other.
While I have taught others the principles behind social learning, it is difficult to get training professionals (and executives and managements of organizations) out of that mind set and into a new paradigm.