social learning
Pro Tip: show don’t tell
“My advice would be to start small and get some quick wins to build momentum. It is very important to showcase the power of social learning, thus adopt the show not tell principle. Don’t just talk about it, demonstrate the benefi ts with case studies.” Con Sotidis @Learnkotch
There are many ways to be left behind: through lack of technology skills, through lack of permission to contribute, poor communication skills or a lack of understanding of the rules (or rules that change).
Think about how to support people. Think about how to safeguard them and show them respect. Think about how to share the rules to avoid accidental issues.
In practice: Be careful where you share. In an Enterprise Social Network with members that may not be direct employees, you need to be sure that when sharing takes place there’s no inadvertent sharing with members of the extended enterprise that may cause sensitivities. For example, a manufacturer may have multiple resellers or partners in their network who are competitors. Sharing tactics may be bad for business. In these cases, extra care is needed. The level of administrative control, including multi-tenancy in Totara Social means that the appropriate people are managing user accounts and end users are engaging with others who they know to be part of their organisation.
Richard Wyles is co-founder and CEO of Totara Learning Solutions and Julian Stodd is a consultant and writer on social learning
@totaralms @julianstodd
6. Moderate fairly and consistently Moderation is a facet of ownership. Moderation needs to be clear, purposeful and, above all, transparent and engaged. Ideally, the community will take ownership itself, but to encourage usage and prove that the community is a safe place to be, you’ll want to take a safeguarding role and responsibility, even if it’s very light touch. You need clarity about when to ATTEND to something, when to just OBSERVE it, and when to call in expert SUPPORT. Moderation isn’t just about stopping people swearing: it’s about nurturing and guiding. And if you ever do have to STOP something, you need to offer feedback, personalised and contextualised in the moment. Have a conversation, don’t publicly rebuke people. It won’t change behaviours. And it may kill off engagement.
7. Make it safe to share When we start to employ collaborative online social spaces, we have a responsibility to ensure nobody is disenfranchised. If you encourage people to share, then they’re not treated with respect, they will leave. There are many ways to be left behind: through lack of technology skills, through lack of permission to contribute, poor communication skills or a lack of understanding of the rules (or rules that change). Common areas to fail are around privacy, permanence and movement. Privacy is a failure to recognise who can see what: people may think that they are contributing in a private space, or to an individual, but in fact the space is public (or becomes public subsequently). Typically there is a systems approach to this, where we think that safeguarding is a function of technology, but there is a social aspect to it as well: part of our moderation and work in forming communities must be to safeguard and guide people. Permanence is where contributions come back to haunt us: do you have clarity about this and are you sharing it widely? Are all groups permanent, or will they be deleted or locked?
Movement is where a contribution is made in one space, but ends up somewhere else: someone copies and pastes it or quotes it. Do people understand this: and are we making them aware of it? The general rule of thumb is, if you wouldn’t want someone, somewhere, to know you said it: don’t say it. But we can’t assume everyone knows this.
20 e.learning age june 2015
TAKEAWAY: Build engagement through fl exibility, co-creation and trust
Engaging users in social learning spaces requires fl exibility. So you can try to guess which groups exist, create social spaced for them and provide structure, but in reality you should stay highly agile in your approach and view your role as facilitating: be the place people can turn to in order to create and manage their own communities. So you should experiment. Create some spaces, but don’t try to create
them all. Create some groups but be very open about your willingness to support others in their efforts to do so. And reward initiative with reputation, with social authority. Use your offi cial voices to recognise innovation and effort.
Engagement is about co-creating a social space with your users. So be social in the act of engagement: ask them what spaces they want. How do they want to use the system and how willing are you to engage in that activity. For example, if a project community wants a private space to let off steam, will you oblige? Are you willing to provide closed groups? And if so, are the rules clear about that data? If it’s not clear, it’s not fair, and people won’t engage. Never assume permission: it’s a quick route to fracturing trust. Employ the seven steps here to build and hold trust in your social learning spaces.
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