Still Learning ... through #lrnchat

Where do I spend my Thursday nights?  Well, between 8:30 and 10:00 PM eastern time, I'm usually online participating in a twitter-based #lrnchat discussion.  For those of you who are not familiar with #lrnchat, it is a weekly gathering of workplace learning professionals, hobbyists, academic enthusiasts, and education junkies who get together to discuss learning topics.  A very geeky thing to do I'll admit, but it is a lot of fun.  It has also been an important part of my professional growth and development since I began participating in - and learning from - these chats in October 2009.  I wrote this blog post: I Have Learned ... Socially!!! at the time to share the excitement I had in that experience. I have been returning ever since.

I have to admit, not every topic, every week is a home run, but the batting average is pretty impressive.  And even in those weeks when to topic isn't the greatest, it is still fun to talk and share laughs with the other community members.  But every once in a while, a thought provoking question, a comment, or a discussion thread whacks me on the side of the head and a good idea penetrates my thick skull.  That happened again this week.   The topic was "Using Social Media in Projects."   The first question of the night was, "What projects are you working on that use social media?"   Happily, I was able to contribute a few responses here.  I and my team have been incorporating social media tools into our learning design for quite some time now.  But it was the second question that hit me upside the head:  "How are you using social media to gather formative data about your projects?"   This was a simple, straightforward question.  It absolutely made sense.  But the truth of the matter is I haven't been using social media to gather formative data.  I don't really know why.  I'm usually very diligent about analysis and data gathering in the early stages of a learning project.  In fact, I'm sometimes criticized for spending too much time doing it.  It never occurred to me that I could be using social media as part of my data collecting.  But as soon as I thought about it, it made absolute sense to do so.  I can cast a wider net and likely get a faster response than I can with traditional data collection methods.

The good news is that I can learn.  My company has recently re-outfitted our sales and service employees with an upgraded mobile device.  The time is right for us to begin deploying mobile learning.  We are in the early stages of developing our strategy.  So on Friday, I logged onto my company's yammer network and posted a few questions about mobile learning.  I asked people to share experiences they may have already had with mobile learning, and to share expectations about topics, tools and support they would like to see through mobile learning.   Responses were starting to trickle in by the end of the day.   I will continue the dialog next week.

Thanks again to my #lrnchat buddies for the whack in the head.  See you next Thursday.

I Have Learned...Socially!!!

After two months of blogging and tweeting, I have actually begun to learn something through this experience.  Here is my story:

On Thursday night I participated in a #lrnchat session on Twitter with other people interested in learning.  The theme of the chat was, "learning from each other socially in different ways."  I logged on a few minutes early and was politely greeted by a few others who were already there.  At the appointed start time, the chat leader began tweeting the rules.  They appeared on screen one by one, interspersed with greetings from other chatters who were just arriving.  There were seven rules in all.  The gist of which I have repeated here:

1. Introduce yourself and your location
2. Share your favorite topics
3. Write complete thoughts so those seeing your tweets outside of the chat will understand them
4. Play nice (but sarcasm was welcomed!)
5. Periodically retweet so others will understand the context of your responses  (I didn't get this at first, but I got it now)
6. Remember to include #lrnchat in all posts (Putting this at the end of your tweets includes your post in the chat stream)
7. Five minutes before the end of the session, let the group know if you need anything from them and then close by reintroducing yourself

After all the rules were read, several threads of discussion took place.   I paid attention and participated in a few, but there were several others that went right by me.

The first thread I followed had responses to a prompt asking, "What have you learned this week?"   Some learned about instructional design, some about twitter; I typed that I learned there is a community of learners that meets through Tweetchat on Thursday nights.

Then we began to discuss social learning.  One person suggested social learning is the convergence of ideas. Someone else suggested that all learning is social.  Several people refuted this with examples and testimony.  I asked, "How does social learning fit into the corporate learning world with its security restrictions and data privacy concerns?"  One person sent me a direct response saying, "It doesn't...it's the very antithesis...uncontrolled by "the man" and self/group constructed."   I thought that was interesting, since one of my goals is to learn how to bring these tools into the corporate learning environment.  I'll be thinking about this one for a while.

Someone asked, "If Socrates coulda' tweeted...would that be social learning?"  This garnered the response: Socratweets!

After all of this, a good discussion thread got started on learning measurement.  Certainly it is difficult to get a handle on the impact that learning through social media could have on a business.  It was clear that this issue creates a barrier for acceptance in the corporate learning world.

In all, the chat lasted ninety minutes.  I had fun participating in it and afterwards - as a good learner should do - I took time to reflect.  So here is a brief summary of my thoughts about my experiences with social learning this week:

1. I have been blogging for about two months now.  During that time I have been reading and connecting with other bloggers.  It is through one of these connections that I discovered the existence of the #lrnchat group
2. By linking back to another blogger who read and commented on one of my blogs, I learned some of the vocabulary and syntax used to make tweeting more effective
3. Through #lrnchat, I learned that there is more to twitter than just isolated tweets
4. I learned that twitter can be effective for learning if you have people with common interests all tweeting together at the same time
5. I learned you can make your tweeting more meaningful by using techniques like retweeting, direct replies, and writing complete thoughts

So I think I'm beginning to get the idea of social learning.  I'm not ready to include it in my instructional strategies at work yet, but I'm hopeful that I will be able to at some point.

For you curious social anthropologist types, here is a link to Thursday's #lrnchat transcript.  Be warned, you have to navigate through the zigzag nature of the discussion threads.  As a matter of fact, someone in the group suggested coining a new term for this: Zigzag Learning.  You can also see my contributions to the discussion in isolation by going to http://twitter.com/mpetersell  and viewing my posts dated Thursday, October 1.