Extending Learning through Yammer

Take a look at the two machine parts in this picture.  They are Vacuum Deck Blower Motors.  When presented next to each other side by side, it is pretty easy to see that they are not the same.  The one on the left is slightly taller.  If you were to go inside the housing you would see that they have different constructions and different controllers.  That is because they are made for different machines and they are not interchangeable.  But if you didn’t have them standing right next to each other, you might easily mistake one for the other and place the wrong one in the wrong machine during maintenance or while making repairs.  Some of our service representatives have made that mistake.

Of course, when they go through training they are instructed on the differences in usage and labeling so they can recognize and install the right part into the right machine.   Fortunately our equipment is pretty reliable which means there might be a long interval between the time service reps receive this training and the time they might actually have to make this repair.   It is easy to see how they might forget what they’ve learned and install the wrong part.

That is one of the frustrations expressed by the Technical Training Instructor who leads the class in which this is covered.   He is an excellent instructor.  He covers everything the reps need to know, gives them a chance to practice doing it, and provides appropriate feedback before sending them out into the field.  He had been doing this for years and hoping for the best, until he discovered Yammer.   Now he extends the learning beyond the classroom by sharing tips and tricks that the service reps can easily access off of their laptops or mobile devices at the point of need.   The picture of the vacuum deck blowers is actually part of a job aid he attached to a post in the Yammer group he recently created.  In the short time since this group has been up and running, he has been able to share pictures, videos, and job aids -  and generally give the service reps the benefit of his expertise at the point of need.  At the same time, he is learning from them.  He is learning about the challenges and the most common problems they face in the field.  This information allows him to incrementally improve his classroom training approach and materials.

Top 10 Tools for Learning in 2011

Each Year, Jane Hart founder of the Center for Learning & Performance Technologies invites learning professionals from around the globe to vote on top tools for learning.  Voting closes tomorrow November 13.  Afterwards, she will publish the final list.

It is tough to limit choices to 10 tools, but here is the list I submitted based on what we have been using inside my company, and what I have been using personally for informal learning, development and collaboration.

1. Microsoft SharePoint - we have been using this to create learning environments around formal courses to enable informal learning - includes wikis, shared calendars, document repository and many other joyful tools!
2. Yammer - our enterprise microblogging tool has provided a venue for groups to form and learn from each other.  Informal learning, collaboration, social learning, sharing - it all happens here.
3. Microsoft Office Communicator - share your desktop and video conference using voice over IP in an instant.
4. Delicious - my personal knowledge management favorite.
5. Skype - bringing people together - even when they're not!
6. YouTube - when you want to make a point clear to people, you can usually find a brief video to share that does it for you.
7. Dropbox - new to me and moving up the list. With the growth of tablets, this tool becomes more important for sharing.
8. SlideShare - great for researching presentations and sharing your own
9. Twitter - I've learned more through the connections I've made through twitter over the last two years than through any other means.
10. Ted Talks - If you haven't seen one, check them out.

If I could have added two more I would have added Evernote, and of course, Blogger.

3 Ways to Foster Collaborative Learning #LCBQ

The Learning Circuits Big Question (#LCBQ) for June asks:

 How do we break down organizational walls when it comes to learning?

To me, this is really a question about organizational readiness for collaborative learning. As I assess my own work situation, I think about the expectations the business leaders in my company have about what learning is, and I think about the dynamics within the learning group. In both cases, there is some change management needed. Here are three things I focus on to foster the evolution of collaborative learning in my organization:

Help people recognize that formal learning is not always the answer. Business leaders often come to us saying, “We have a training need.” In their mental model of the situation, they envision people sitting in a classroom for a couple of days, or going online to complete a few elearning modules and the problem is solved. Likewise, it is a knee-jerk reaction for instructors who make their living in the classroom, or for course developers who produce and publish elearning, to think of formal learning as a solution first. Sometimes this will be the answer, but in many cases, slowing things down and considering other alternatives can yield creative and effective solutions other than formal learning. The communication tools and connectivity we have today through our laptops, mobile devices and social media create many possibilities for learning through collaboration.

Partner with the geeks. Every company has them. They are the IT people who are always pushing for the latest technology upgrades; the marketing people who blog, tweet and update company events on facebook; the recruiters who do all of their networking and sourcing through LinkedIn. They have made the leap from the traditional ways of doing things in their field to newer approaches. They recognize the power of the community and the relative ease with which people can be summoned and organized through social media at virtually no cost. It is among these folks that you will find champions for change who will help you knock down the walls.

Let communities grow organically. While it may be tempting to try to jump start collaborative learning by requiring people to sign up and participate in social media groups, this really cannot be forced. Collaboration through social media, for learning or other purposes, has to be an “opt in” experience. The most successful communities are built around common interests by people who want to be there because they are passionate about the topics or issues being discussed. That doesn’t mean you have to sit back and wait. As a learning person you should be present and visible on social media in your organization. Model behavior for business people and your learning colleagues. Seed the waters in the conversation stream by sharing resources and links around topics that are of interest to your learners. They in turn will be encouraged to join in the conversation and share as well.  We have been doing this for some time at my company. Check out this blog post from January 2010: Social Media Strategy for Learning for information on how we have been doing this using yammer.

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.

Informal Learning through Social Media - the First Ripple

From just a few drops, you can create quite a ripple effect.

It may sound cliche, but it is an appropriate metaphor for what happened last week:

If you have been reading Many Ways to Learn over the last year or so, you know that one of the topics I frequently write about is the use of Yammer for learning purposes.   I have made a deliberate attempt to get people in my company to recognize the value of using this internal microblogging tool to connect with people informally, to share information, and to collaborate with one another.   Two key things I and my team members do to foster Yammer usage are:

1. Post messages and links on topics that are important to our learners.  Some of our most popular topics are #leadership #managing #change and #remote-teams.   We have been particularly focused on managers. We encourage dialogue around these topics and each of my team members has a growing base of followers as a result of the messages we post.
2. Participate in a Yammer-based community group called Innovations in Learning.   This group discusses a different workplace learning topic every other month on Yammer.  At the end of the two-month cycle, we have a virtual meet-up to discuss the questions and messages that were posted about the topic for that period.  It is a public group inside my company that is open to anyone, but the majority of the members are instructional designers, course developers, classroom facilitators, and the like.  My goal in forming this group was twofold:  to start a community of practice on workplace learning, and to have the learning professionals in my company see how we could help others use social media as a complement to formal learning.

Last week I received this message from one of our managers:

"You were the first person I followed on Yammer and you seem to be very experienced on group and/or subject creation. Could you spend 10 to 15 minutes on the phone with me to help me facilitate a group dedicated to the competitive channel for dialogue starters and info sharing?"

I was so excited to receive this message.  After all the efforts we have made over the last few months, it was nice to see that someone had recognized the power of what we were doing and wanted to replicate that for another topic.  He has since set up a Yammer group and already has 24 members.  Unlike other Yammer groups that exist in the company, this one is not just about shared interests, it is focused on creating direct business success by being a forum for sharing ideas on how to sell against the competition.  I think this is an important milestone in our evolution towards embedding informal learning in the workstream.  I'm looking forward to many more groups like this sprouting up. 

Social Media at Conferences, Revisited

In September 2009, I wrote this blog entry: Tweeting at Conferences: Etiquette vs. Impact about whether or not it was rude to tweet at conferences.  As someone who was new to social media at the time, my perspective was that when listening to a speaker at a conference, the polite thing to do was to put your handheld device away and give the speaker your full attention. What a difference a year and a half of experience can make. Now my view is that, as long as you are discreet and don't create distractions, it is not only complimentary to the speaker to share messages about what is being presented it is also valuable to do so, in a number of ways.

This week I attended a kick-off meeting in Dallas for my company's most important business unit.  Business leaders, managers and people from key staff functions spent four days together discussing strategy and tactics for 2011.  This was a business meeting not a learning event, so my team members and I mostly had time to experience the conference from a participant's point-of-view.  I had the good fortune to be able to listen, absorb, and share a lot of what I was experiencing through our company microblogging tool: Yammer, which is very similar to Twitter, only access is restricted solely to my company's employees.

Over the course of the four days, I posted messages that included direct quotes from business leaders, summaries of presentations, my thoughts about the implications of some of the things I heard, and general updates about what we were doing, the atmosphere, and the mood in the room. I really had four goals in mind as I was doing this:

1. Share information with other team members - I manage a remote team that is scattered about the US.  Not all of them were able to attend the conference.  I wanted the team members who weren't able to be there to get as much real-time information as possible about the strategy so they could begin thinking about how it would impact their work.
2. Exchange thoughts and impressions with other conference goers - Using social media is still relatively new in my company.  There were only a few other people at the conference who were also posting updates on Yammer.  But it was nice to connect with others in the room this way and jointly share our thoughts through discussion threads.
3. Share information with others in the company - One of the conference goers who is also one of my yammer followers saw my yammer posts and came up to during the conference to say, "What a great idea: actually sharing our strategy with as many people in the company as possible, as early as possible."
4. Create an archive of notes - I attached the hashtag (#) "Dallas" to all of the messages I posted during the conference so that I - and anyone else who might be interested - could easily retrieve them when needed after the event. 

On all counts I was successful.  And the messaging was not just one-way.  Team members and others who were not at the event responded to my posts with questions and comments that encouraged me to share more information, provide clarifications, and go into more depth on the topics that were of most interest. 

Right Here in Our Own Little Community!

It has been just about four months since our formal instructional design standards committee morphed into the broader and less formal Innovations in Learning Community of Practice.  We are an internal company group that discusses different learning topics through Yammer each month.  At the end of the month, we have a virtual Meet-up to discuss the Yammer posts.  The core of the community is still made up of a handful of instructional designers from within my department, but we've grown modestly (29 members!) as we have widened our focus from instructional design, to workplace learning.  We have been joined by course developers from other learning groups within the company, classroom facilitators, marketing people, and line employees who have no formal role in workplace learning at all.

As a result of our recent growth, three exciting developments have occurred:

1. The center of the community is shifting - I am pleased to say that community members from outside the original group from my department are taking an active role in the community.  For the first time, the topic discussion at our next virtual Meet-up will led by a community member from another department. 
2. The "rules" and norms are changing - Not surprisingly, as other group members take an active role in the community, new rules and new norms are developing.   Timelines for discussions are extending and we are changing the format of our next virtual Meet-up a bit.  I couldn't be happier about this.   I was afraid that this was going to be viewed as "Mike's group."  Now I'm beginning to envision a day when I can step back to the fringes and let others take the lead.  I think it is still a ways away, but this is encouraging.
3. We've attracted "hobbyists" who may want to turn "pro" - This is the most exciting development so far.  Two community members from line positions have reached out to me to discuss possible career opportunities in learning roles.  One of them is an enthusiastic hobbyist who has done a lot of communications work. She was attracted by our discussions about Articulate Presenter and has even gone as far a purchasing a software license so she can practice what she is learning.  The other is currently in a sales role. He is also in the final stages of completing his Master's in Adult Education. Besides adding new flavors to our community, both of these individuals are now on my radar screen for succession planning.

If you are interested in reading about our development up to this point, review these two previous posts:

Deciding between Formal and Informal Learning Approaches
Community Building with Yammer

And of course, tune back in a later date for additional updates.

Community Building with Yammer

I always have to remind myself that whenever we try new approaches to learning at work things start slowly, build gradually, eventually gain momentum, and ultimately become institutionalized.  Right now I am in the "starts slowly" phase with my attempt to create a Community of Practice out of a loosely formed group of people who are interested in workplace learning at my company.

But isn't that the way an online community is supposed to form? An individual shares some content online that is of personal interest.  Others with common interests discover it and share similar content of their own.  Conversations begin to flow about it.  After a while one person puts up a flag and calls it a group.  That is exactly what is happening with our Innovations in Learning group.  What is the Innovations in Learning group?

It is a Yammer-based Community of Practice group open to anyone in my company who is interested in workplace learning. The group primarily comprises learning professionals but we encourage anyone interested in learning to join the conversations.  We decided to focus on a new topic each month using Yammer for discussion and sharing resources, links, and articles.  At the end of each month, we have a virtual Meet-up using Microsoft Live Meeting. Our topic for September is Video Conferencing. We will discuss the topic asynchronously throughout the month. Our Meet-up is scheduled for September 24.  A week before the Meet-up I will send meeting invitations to all group members through Yammer.   I'll include the discussion questions that we will go through during the Meet-up.

We had our first Meet-up in August.  Only six of our 23 members participated in the month-end discussion.  Despite the low turn-out, I'm encouraged.  This is new to everyone.  It was only our first meeting.  As I said earlier, we are in the "starts slowly" phase.  I know the momentum will build and that ultimately our community will thrive.   Once the members of our group get comfortable with the process, I envision us replicating it to foster learning communities around other topics that are important in our company.

Using Yammer for Learning

 If you are a reader of this blog, you know that I have written a few posts about my experiences with Yammer and how my team uses it to encourage and foster informal learning in my company. Having read a few of my entries, the kind folks over at Yammer invited me to take a turn as guest blogger.

Check out the post over at the Yammer blog: Try Yammer; Maybe You'll Learn Something

You can also review my previous entries about Yammer in this blog: @dorothy there's no place like home #oz,  Social Media Strategy for Learning, Formalizing Informal Learning and Yammering On; Others Yammer Back . 

Yammer is increasingly becoming an important part of the way we work in my company.  It has also challenged us to think about how people learn in a hyper-connected world.

Yammering On; Others Yammer Back

"This morning, for the first time ever, I checked Yammer before I checked my email. Should I be worried?"

This quote came from a post on my yammer feed on Friday.   It was from an employee in my company who I never met and don't even know by name or reputation.   According to his profile, he is an engineer.  I don't know why this post showed up in my feed. We must have both joined the same group.  Or maybe we are just following the same topics.   That is the way it goes with social media.  You are able to connect with people who you might otherwise never have met or spoken to in the course of your work day.  Anyway,  I am grateful to him for capturing my attention with this post.  Now I am one of his yammer followers.

I've been thinking about this quote a lot over the last few days.   It says so much about how I have been feeling about social media these past months.   The first part of the quote tells me that my new friend in engineering has turned a corner.   Instead of waking up and checking his email to get a pulse on what is going on that might impact his day, he turned to our social media network first.   What a simple but profound change that is.   Social media displacing email in this man's daily routine.   I still check my email before yammer, but I spend a lot of time during my day thinking about how we can reach people through yammer to provide information that might help them with their jobs or personal development needs.

The second part of the quote is also fascinating. Clearly, he is questioning whether or not this new change of routine is a good thing or a bad thing.   I go through the same feelings of cognitive dissonance when I think about trying to promote yammer as a tool for informal learning.   When I first proposed the idea to my staff of using yammer as a learning medium to reach our target audience,  my suggestion was greeted with a long silent pause and a few rolling eyes.   But I convinced the team to humor me for a while, and in the short time we have been implementing our yammer strategy, we have each been able to report back on some interesting events that have occurred.

My staff member who has been posting information on dealing with change reported that one of her followers replied to her that she was finding comfort in the messages.  They were helping her to see that she was not alone in what she was going through in dealing with change.  This prompted further dialog that gave my team member the opportunity to share additional resources with her and other followers.

Another staff member caught the eye of the corporate communications department with a thread of her posts about managing virtual teams.   They contacted her about incorporating her posts into an article for the company newsletter, giving her messages greater reach and impact.

A third staff member has been posting messages about project management.  He recently got a reply from a VP who is very influential with key stakeholders for many of our projects.  His reply enhanced the credibility of the project management messages and helped to increase the number of followers on this topic thread.

When faced with skepticism from others in my organization, my belief about the viability of social networking as a learning tool inside my company sometimes wavers.  But the instances cited here provide reinforcement that tells me to keep pressing on with our plan.   The number of participants on our social network is growing every day.  As more users join in, we want them to find content that will be of value to them, and that will encourage them to share some of their own.

Formalizing Informal Learning

As stated in my blog post from January 16, I have rededicated myself to using social media for learning at work.  Following the strategy I outlined on January 24, each of my team members is now actively engaged in managing various topics on the corporate social media network (yammer).  This marks the end of the first week of us using yammer at work.  So far we are off to a great start.

I have three staff members on my management development team.   Here is a sample post from each of them. These posts were collected from my yammer feed from this week:

Team member #1 is the topic leader for the discussion on #remote_teams.  As discussed in last week's blog post, remote management and virtual teams are fast growing trends in my company.   We have included remote management as a topic in all of our recent management training programs.  It seemed only natural to continue the discussion through our social media network.

Team member #2 is the topic leader for the discussion on #project_management.  As I'm sure is the case in all companies, project management is an important topic.   A few years back we began to take an enterprise wide look at how projects were managed inside the company.   We have been gradually migrating different departments to take a uniform approach to projects.  Our current approach is aligned to the PMBOK guidelines.

Team Member #3 is the topic leader for the discussion on #change.  Our company is transforming the way we do business.  This has meant large and small scale changes taking place in every business unit and every department.  Each day this week team member #3 has shared some of the myths and realities about workplace change from The Employee Handbook of Organizational Change by Price Pritchett.

In addition to these topics, I personally lead the discussion on the topic of #managing.  All four of us participate in each other's discussions and we also post to disucssions on #leadership, #engagement and #growth.  Besides managing these topics, we are active in several newly formed yammer groups.  Our goal is to deliberately create an information pipeline around important management topics that can be captured as informal learning through the social media network. 

To help us get a jumpstart on building our followers, I created the flyer shown below.   This week I participated in a management kick-off meeting that was attended by over 300 managers.  Our Learning & Performance group had an "expo-like" table set up at the event.  I handed out many of these flyers and talked to a lot of managers about our new social media network.   Very few of them were aware that yammer was available inside the company.  Most of them had never even heard of it.

Although it is new, I'm confident that our social media network will grow quickly. There are only a handful of users today, but I'm sure there will be many more very soon. I want my team to be active and ready to guide others how to take advantage of this tool for informal learning when they get there.  From these small beginnings, I expect great things to occur.

Social Media Strategy for Learning

In last week's Many Ways to Learn blog post, I wrote about how I was rededicating myself to building learning communities inside my company using yammer.   This week I took the first steps toward that goal by outlining a strategy and placing a few posts to generate some activity.



Here is the approach I am taking:

1. Use hashtags (#) to create threads around specific topics - Since my primary role is management development, the hashtags I have started with are:  #leadership #managing #change #engagement
2. Join groups - The department that runs our annual employee engagement survey has already set-up an engagement group, so I have joined that.  There is also a group dedicated to promoting social media usage inside the company.  I have joined that as well, along with a few others.
3. Create "Topic Managers" to lead specific threads - I am going to have each of my staff members specialize in a topic that is important to management and create groups and/or discussion threads for those topics using hashtags.
4. Promote usage  - Since yammer is a relatively new tool in my company, my team and I will take every opportunity to introduce it and promote it during face-to-face or virtual training sessions and at company events.

It takes time to build a following, so I recognize the need to be patient.  So far, I am encouraged with the trickle of activity created by my posts during the week.   Here are few examples of what I have been doing:

Example 1 - Providing quick tips and identifying resources that could be helpful to managers

The post below includes some brief thoughts about building trust from the book, The Carrot Principle.  Notice that four people indicated that they "like this."  It may not seem like much, but I am just starting out.  I started the week with only 17 followers.

Example 2 - Promoting learning and performance support tools available to managers

One of my staff members recently interviewed five managers who had very high scores on our last employee engagement survey.   He created a podcast series to help managers develop action plans for increasing employee engagement from those interviews.  The day I posted this, I received a reply from a manager saying she had listened to all five, she thought they were great, and that she was passing them on to her friends.  Hooray for small victories!  (Note: I removed the link from this example for confidentiality purposes.)

Example 3 - Sharing quotes (and again promoting available resources)

The quote below is from In Praise of the Incomplete Leader, a Harvard Business Review Article which is available to our employees through Harvard ManageMentor (an excellent learning and performance support tool by the way) which they can access through our Learning Management System (branded internally as My Portfolio).

This is outlines my strategy.  I have added a trickle of followers this week so I know it is getting some attention.   But as I said, it will take time to build a community.  I will post a follow-up on this blog at some point to let you know how things are progressing.  In the meantime, I welcome any feedback, comments or suggestions you might have to help me accelerate the process.

@dorothy - There's No Place Like Home! #Oz

"Oh, but anyway, Toto, we're home. Home! And this is my room, and you're all here. And I'm not gonna leave here ever, ever again, because I love you all, and - oh, Auntie Em - there's no place like home!"

When it comes to social media and my company, I feel a little bit like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Prior to August 2009, I was not really a social media participant. Yes, I had a facebook page and a LinkedIn account, but I was not really present or active in either space. In August, I simultaneously started this blog, opened a twitter account, and logged on to yammer at work. I made a decision that as a learning professional, I needed to embrace social media so that I could learn how to help others use it to capitalize on the informal learning that takes place through these tools every day.

I was excited that my IT department had recently made yammer available inside our organization. It made me feel that my company was being forward-thinking and innovative. But sadly, as I went on to yammer I discovered there were only a handful of users there, mostly from IT and Marketing. I invited others to join me as tried to make some connections and start a dialog around topics that were important for learning, but people mostly responded in ways that made me feel like I was annoying them. Much like Dorothy in Kansas, I felt unappreciated and misunderstood, so I clicked off yammer and went out in search of people who would listen to me. Dorothy left Kansas with a small basket and her dog Toto, and landed in Oz; I sat down at my computer with a cup of coffee and my dog Smokey at my feet, and landed on twitter.

When I arrived, I found it to be a strange and wonderful place. Like Oz, it was a little disorienting at first and it certainly had its perils, but after a while I found a few kind souls in the learning community to help me navigate my own yellow brick road. So for the last few months, I have been out there tweeting and bookmarking links with these fine folks. The list of people who I follow, and those who follow me, has grown at a modest but steady pace. I'm learning new things every day but lately a feeling of melancholy has set in. I have a longing to "get back to Kansas" and share these experiences with my own "family."

So today I decided to click on the yammer icon that has lately been sitting idle on my desktop. And there was Aneta from Marketing and Steve from IT (and not much of anybody else), just as I had left them. It was no glorious homecoming. Not much had changed since I'd been over the rainbow. But of course, now I am different. I've learned so much about the possibilities of social media on my trip through Oz/twitter. One thing I learned is that it takes patience to build a community. So I will yammer on, joining groups, posting quotes and comments, sharing links, and gradually I will build a community of learners - right in my own backyard.

I welcome any comments or suggestions on fostering informal learning and building communities through yammer.

Tweet, Tweet, Tweet, What Does It All Mean?

Okay, I woke up this morning thinking about Twitter.  I know, scary isn't it?  I was thinking, "I should Tweet something, but I really don't have anything meaningful to say in 140 characters or less."  In this week's Learning Consortium call,  Elliott Masie stated that we were in the "hype and experimentation stage" with Twitter.  Last month, the CLO-Network posed the question, "Is social learning the hope for the future or just hype?" Yesterday's entry in the Corporate eLearning Strategies and Development Blog began with, "If you haven't jumped on the Twitter bandwagon because it seems stupid..."  So I find that I am not alone in seeking learning value in this tool that is gaining 10 million users per month.

Bill Sherman is also searching for that value.  He wrote an article in the August issue of Chief Learning Officer titled, "When the Bird Tweets Does Anyone Learn?" One segment of the article I found particularly interesting discusses the conditions that need to be present for social media to serve as a valid learning delivery medium.  Here are his points along with some of my thoughts:

The use of social media must organically fit with the program's overall instructional design, rather than be thrown in as an afterthought.

This is one of the things I fear most right now: people throwing these tools into a program just to be trendy.  A good instructional designer knows the choice of delivery media should be driven by the learning design.  The media chosen has much less impact on a program's success than the instructional strategy.

The organization's technology strategy must support social media to fully leverage the just-in-time learning capabilities the platform offers.

I have to give credit to my company's IT department.  They have recently introduced Yammer (Twitter's corporate cousin) into our organization.  We are beta testing it.  We are also using a software tool for forum discussions to capture ideas for innovation and for holding customer forums about happenings in our industry that impact their business.   So, once we can figure out the best way to leverage these tools for learning, I think we will have the IT support we need.

The organization's culture must intelligently embrace and practice the use of social media.

There are a handful of regular Yammer users in our company.  And, like Twitter, there are many people who have signed on and said, "Hello! I'm here." and were never heard from again.  

Learners must be receptive to social media, and alternatives must be available for those who feel uncomfortable with social media.

This raises yet another challenge for working with multiple generations in the workplace.  My thought here is that if we start by designing the use of social media into programs where it makes sense we can gradually build acceptance.  When I introduced the idea of using a wiki in our onboarding program, at first my senior course developer and the program facilitators were skeptical and resistant.  But after a while, they began to see it was easy to use and added value to the program.  They began to suggest replacing some of our activities with new ones centered on using the wiki.  I'm hoping that in the near future, we will be doing the same with tools like Twitter.  I don't think this bird is just going to fly away.

Discussing Podcasts and Social Networking with the Learning Consortium

Today I participated in one of Elliott Masie’s monthly Learning Consortium calls. For those of you who have not had the pleasure, this is a valuable way to spend an hour each month. Mr. Masie hosts the calls which address topics of interest to the consortium membership. Members submit questions ahead of time and he provides a brief response from his point of view (usually citing research he has done or read) and then opens the line for other consortium members to share their opinions. Two topics of interest to me came up on today’s call: podcasting and social networking tools.


We have tried to do a few things with podcasting as a learning tool in my company, but in truth all we have done is create audio learning programs. The distinction being that audio learning programs are posted on a website and made available for download, whereas podcasts are delivered to a device such as a cell phone or a laptop through a subscription feed. In any event, the process for creating them is the same. One of my team members is currently working on an audio learning series for managers. It will cover ideas for increasing employee engagement. So, when podcasting came up on the call, it caught my interest immediately. Here are a few of the key points that were shared about creating successful podcasts:

1. Keep them focused - the most effective podcasts cover only a single topic
2. Keep them short – don’t overproduce them with long introductions or irrelevant segments
3. Use two or three voices to create interest – like successful radio shows, podcasts work better when there is a dialog between two or three people rather than just a single voice talking to the listener. If possible, use a mix of male and a female voices.

 If you read my earlier blogs on wikis or microblogging, you know web 2.0 tools are of interest to me. I have been experimenting with several tools to try to determine their practical uses for learning. This is one of the reasons I started blogging. The question that was addressed in today’s call was about which tools are making an impact on workplace learning. Mr. Masie described wikis as belonging to the category of “collective intelligence” tools. He stated that these tools have caught on and are making a strong impact. He noted that because these tools are mainly for sharing “user created content” that rating pages or entries has become important. Ratings help sort out the good from the bad content to bring key learning points to the forefront. I have included a “rate my blog” gadget and a “Digg It “ button on this blog so I can get feedback on what people find most valuable when reading Many Ways To Learn.

The discussion about microblogging was right on the money. Mr. Masie described us as being in the “hype and experimentation cycle” with tools such as Twitter. This is absolutely true for me. I have no idea what people expect me to write on Twitter and, quite frankly, I haven’t found many people who are compelling enough to “follow.” Our in-house tool (Yammer) is showing some promise. I have witnessed a few key connections take place through discussions on Yammer. Also, I received a reply to one of my posts from  a VP with whom I wanted to make a connection. A lot of my work aligns with what she is doing in her department. It was nice to see she recognized that as well.

For what it’s worth you can follow me on Twitter if you want to: http://twitter.com/mpetersell. Better still, you can follow Elliott Masie: http://twitter.com/emasie.

Yammering On About Nothing; Kudos for Dr. Gupta!

Okay, so I joined my company's Yammer beta site. My goal as a learning professional is to see what kind of learning possibilities there are through this tool. I wanted to see what kind of dialog is going on in my company. What are the hot topics being discussed? How is knowledge being spread and shared to build a better future for us all?

What did I find? Everyone on Yammer was discussing - Twitter. There was a running thread of yams(?) about this article from Information Week stating that 40% of "tweets" were pointless babble. Up to this point my quest for learning through Web 2.0 tools hadn't been very fruitful.

Back on Twitter, George S and Weird Al weren't providing me much, but I found a ray of hope for learning in a few threads started by Dr. Gupta. He is using "twitpics" to share xrays of various conditions and asking people if they can spot problems. It appears that he has a lot of followers who are medical students and professionals. So Twitter can be used for mini coaching sessions with online followers. Hmmm...

Let's All Microblog!

This week I signed up on Twitter and Yammer and I really have no idea why! These are two popular "microblogs" that "everyone" is using these days to write short snippets about themselves. Twitter is a public microblog that asks the question, "What are you doing right now?" Yammer is its corporate cousin. It has the same basic concept except that it is only open to members of the same company. So instead of asking, "What are you doing?" Yammer wants to know, "What are you working on?" I figure I would give both of these a go to see how they might be useful for learning. The way they work is that you that you sign up to write your snippets (on Twitter these are called tweets; on Yammer are they yams?), you choose people to "follow" if you feel they have interesting snippets, and people choose to follow you.

When I joined Twitter I was presented with an array of choices on people to follow. Not being sure how this was going to work, I chose three people as a starter kit: George Stephanopolous, Weird Al Yankovic, and Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Shortly after I tweeted (do I really have to call it that?) I immediately had three followers: sexytoytwiter, bitchymyall710 (who is having a lingerie party - I guess I'm invited!), and some guy named Vernon. If you are interested in joining my new posse, you can find me at http://twitter.com/mpetersell.

I'll let you know how Yammer is working out in a few days.