Increasingly, as I look around, I see folks addressing learning technology tactics; they’ll make a mobile app, they’ll try out a simulation game, they’ll put in a portal. And there’s nothing wrong with doing each of these as a trial, a test run, some experience under the belt. However, in the longer term, you want to start doing so strategically. I’ll use social media as an example.
Where does social media fit in the organization? In talking with a social media entrepreneur over beers the other day, he mentioned that one of his barriers in dealing with organizations was that they didn’t have a budget line for social media software.
That may sound trivial, but it’s actually a real issue in terms of freeing up the organization. In one instance, it had been the R&D organization that undertook the cost. In another case, the cost was attributed to the overhead incurred in dealing with a merger. These are expedient, but wrong.
Odds are your organization is failing your learners in a variety of predictable but inexcusable ways.
I’ve riffed before about virtual mentorship, and it resonated again today. We were getting a tour of one of the social platforms, organized as many are around tasks, questions, and dialog. While implicitly it could support tracking a group’s progress, separate thoughts as recorded through blogs and tweets aren’t a natural feature. Yes, there’s integration with wikis and blogging tools, but it’s not quite the same. And seeing these meme tracks or thought trails can be a valuable way to understand how someone thinks in context, which can develop others’ thinking. Read more →
