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Elearning Guild Webinar 101 Social Media in e Learning Ur Doin It Right

Elearning Guild Webinar 101 Social Media in e Learning Ur Doin It Right

Third webinar for the day. I m now attending the Elearning Guild webinar on Social Media in e-Learning: Ur Doin It Right

The speakers are:

Mark Oehlert, Defense Acquisition University
Koreen Olbrish,Tandem Learning

Heres the guilds intro to the session:

"Organizations looking for ways to capitalize on the potential of social media, and wanting to leverage it for learning, often dont know where to start, or how other companies have successfully incorporated social media for learning.

Participants in this session will learn how companies large and small have integrated social media into their e-Learning initiatives, and how that has changed the way people work and learn. Participants will get great case-study examples of successful social media integrations for learning. They will also gain exposure to the lessons learned from these integrations, and specific instructions on how to get started in their own organizations."

Mark is a well known social media and gaming expert in industry circles and Koreens blog about virtual worlds, games, simulations and everything about learning experiences is one that I follow regularly. I trust what these people say -- so this session should be worthwhile. Lets see what comes out.

Mark starts off with some stage setting/ intros - well I know you guys! You dont know me, but oh well! And damn, I get logged off! So what social media tools do people use?

• 54% Twitter
• 77% Facebook
• 3% Myspace
• 22% Delicious
• 14% Google Wave
• 14% Flickr
• 50% Youtube
• 3% Ning

Ok the webinar is a bit slow right now, but I guess itll pick up pace soon.

So what are the big ideas?

• What we would do if we had a blank slate? - We seem to be really wrapped up in legacy issues of restrictions etc. We need to think about the problems were trying to solve, figure the right solution and then work backwards from there.
• Correctly estimating the impact of technology - our fascination for technology alone needs to be more pragmatic. So dropping the hype and opening our eyes to the transformative effect of technologies is a good step.
  
• We vs Me - Whats the dollar value of not letting social media in the organisation?
  
• Culture & Change Management: Its not about the technology its about culture, its about managing the change. You need to balance the fear, control and trust factors in the entire game.
  
• Transmission loss: How will we improve the efficiency of the organisation and also your own learning organisation?
  
• Think big. Start small. Move fast. -- Hmm not sure I agree with start small. Ask Andrew Mcafee.
  

Case Study #1: The Wind Turbine Company

The company wanted to create a performance support network for a dispersed population of turbine techies. So they used Yammer to create a secure network to share information in real-time. Now they save 3-5 million savings in terms of turbines staying up. So they reduced the Transmission Loss. Ah! Thats a good case study!

Case Study #2: #Lrnchat

About 26% of the respondents in the survey havent participated in #lrnchat. Having been someone who kept track of all the #lrnchat tweets because I cant participate that early in the morning, I know #lrnchat can be really useful. I know its a really, really useful and a persistent communications channel. So at a really low cost, you now have a very powerful community that continuously collaborates usefully.

Case Study #3 Tandem Learning

Tandem - Koreens company is a small organisation that needed to share and collaborate on multiple client projects with nationally dispersed employees. So they use multiple social media tools, Base Camp, Yammer, etc to allow visibility and access to relevant data and allow real-time client-focussed updates.

Now their projects are trackable anywhere, anytime! Theyre able to share client requirements in real-time as well. Koreen, you should try Mingle! Ill be happy to give you a tour and youll never go back to Basecamp. Koreen also mentions Rypple as a way to get feedback from your peers. Im going to look this up - thanks Koreen! Someone mentioned this amazing visualisation tool for Twitter. Heres Marks map from the tool.

Case Study #4 Defense Acquisition University

Marks organisation - more than 10,000 people! So this thing does scale, as you can see. So the DAU is a large corporate university within Department of Defense. They needed to know new channels to reach their customer base and internal faculty. They have wikis, blogs, Yammer and several other platforms internally.

As a consequence, internal micro blogging capability is being used by almost half of the staff/ faculty with no outreach at all. Content owners are bloggin and the community contributes to the knowledge base. The cool thing with tools like Yammer is that since people can use it for free you can go ahead and make the business case when it gains momentum. Thats where tools like Social Text and Cyn.in win because they have a free, low entry barrier start. I now understand the point about starting small - Mark isnt talking about creating walled gardens. Hes talking about starting with no ego and no huge fanfare.

Case Study #5 Boston College

Boston College is a traditional resident college was being pushed by student expectations to incorporate more 2.0 tools into the classroom experience to make things more engaging. Theyve deployed an enterprise class social media suite (SocialText!) and as an outcome they now have relevant news feeds, have the ability to extend classroom experiences beyond the class and engage with additional writing and learning experiences. The cool thing with social media is that the experience of education never has to stop. People can maintain connection with their universities, their classmates, future students, faculty even after their university experience is long over. The possibilities from here are immense. People can learn from each other by critiquing, helping each other.

I love these case studies -- we havent quantified the value of this stuff too much, but this is great starting evidence for CLOs to sit up and take notice. Good stuff guys!

So the starting line is - Think big, start small, move fast. Mark I now understand. We need to get over the human issues - the IT issues are easier to solve. I agree - good webinar.

Available link for download