I am currently reading The New Social Learning by Tony Bingham and Marcia Connor. This book is about enabling, supporting, and boosting the learning that is going on via social means of an organization’s employees. Of course, I am more interested in doing all of this for the students in my class, but I am hopeful that I will be able to transfer some insights from one context to another. As I have started to read it, I’m getting so many ideas; in this post I list of the ones from just Chapter 1 that excite me most; the emphases below are mine. I assume that longer posts will follow on some of these individual ideas (and on some from later chapters). This is not meant to be a review or to capture the important points from the book — this is just a set of my reactions to some of their ideas at the beginning of the book.
A student’s roles in a class
From p5: “We encourage you to use this book to discover how social media tools facilitate learning, how they might be leveraged to extend and expand your interactions with colleagues, and how to use them to create something vibrant. As Chris Brogan, one of the top bloggers in the world, coauthor of Trust Agents, and author of Social Media 101 says, ‘Focus on connecting with the people, and the tools will all make sense.’ ” — When designing my upcoming class, I continue to look for tools that enable connections at the right time, but I’m also thinking of how I can get across the idea to the students that they are supposed to support each other, to teach each other, to share with each other. They have been programmed from at least elementary school (and certainly at Michigan Ross with our enforced curve) that school is a competitive experience, that if you do better, then someone else has to do worse. I will have a strong tide to swim against.
The social basis of knowledge
From p7: “At its most basic level, new social learning can result in people becoming more informed, gaining a wider perspective, and being able to make better decisions by engaging with others. It acknowledges that learning happens with and through other people, as a matter of participating in a community, not just by acquiring knowledge.” — It has only been in the last few years that I have come to know this! (I’m a little slow sometimes. Okay, a lot of the time.) I have come to know that knowledge is an extremely social construct, that knowing something in some sense means knowing how to work with and through other people to get something done, that if you don’t have that level of knowledge, then you don’t really know something. If it’s possible to teach a class in a way that supports a discovery of this truth, then I will be looking for that way.
Technology for social learning
Social learning isn’t new. It has been going on since humans have walked the planet. We have used technology to support the process for at least 50 years (even though that’t not what it was called at the time). — Personally, I tend to get somewhat swept up in the latest technology. (If you know me, you know that I just said the equivalent of “The sun is hot.”) But I have been around long enough to know that this is true…at some level. The technology might have supported this process before, but it was only for people with a certain skills set or for people who worked in a certain industry. The technology now seems to be available and useful to a much broader segment of the population doing a much broader range of tasks. Given this, it seems like it would be useful to get students some experience with these tools sooner rather than later.
Social learning for higher ed
Social learning technologies “move services, assets, smarts, and guidance closer to where they are needed — to people seeking answers, solving problems, overcoming uncertainty, and improving how they work.” — This captures why I think social learning technologies would be useful for my class. I am not going to have all the answers; I want students to take ownership of some of the material and learn to share their own expertise; I want students to learn to reach out to a community for answers instead of just the supposed expert (i.e., me), even though that is what they have been trained to do all of their academic lives. Once they get into the work world, they will have to learn to operate in this generally ambiguous fashion. I figure I can start the process early for them in order to give them a leg up once they get out into the real world.
Social learning in my class
On p9 the authors explain what social learning is not, and this helped me clarify my thinking related to how I would use these technologies in my class:
- It’s not at odds with formal education. By setting the students up with twitter accounts (that is, those that don’t have one already), I can enable them to share and seek information formally and informally (if that distinction even makes sense any more).
- It’s not a replacement for training… That’s good, because I was still planning on using training videos and in-person experiences and online exercises in the class.
Appropriate testing
On p11: “The 21st century mind is a collective mind where we access what we know in our friends’ and colleagues’ brains. Together we can be smarter and can address ever more challenging problems. What we store in our heads may not be as important as all that we can tap in our networks. Together we are better.” — Testing a student’s ability to recall facts just seems silly in today’s world. What we need to be testing is a student’s ability to solve a problem using appropriate methods. More and more, “appropriate methods” include usage of the student’s personal network. Why? Because that is how they will address problems for the rest of their lives. It is a social world, and no student will ever be an island. (Except, apparently, if they sit in a classroom.)
Sharing expertise vs. enabling collaboration
On p19: “Learning can easily occur anytime, anywhere, and in a variety of formats. It always has, but now it’s codified and easy for others to see. These new social tools can enable organizations to strike a balance between surfacing the knowledge people need and giving them the ease and freedom to learn in a healthy and open way.” — Organizations have long worked to get employees to share their expertise so that others can build upon it. It seems to me that this new model of social learning has a bit different take on this. Efforts here are focused on getting employees to collaborate in problem solving, to draw them explicitly into the process so that their expertise can be used directly. The social tools should make it easier to reach out to these people, and to establish the true nature of the need for others to see (via an ongoing open, sharing practice).
Expanding the boundaries
On p20: “Learning is what makes us more vibrant participants in a world seeking fresh perspectives, novel insights, and first-hand experiences. When shared, what we have learned mixes with what others have learned, then ripples out, transforming organizations, enterprises, ecosystems, and the society around us.” — I want to make my class as valuable as possible. I want students to share what they have learned. I want people who are not in my class to be able to get a glimpse of the wonderful experiences we have shared in the class. I want students in my future classes to build upon the works and learning of my current class so that future students can go beyond where my current students are able to go. How? That’s a topic for a future post! But I think it’s a good goal, and one that is in reach.
How and when students learn
On p20: Some researchers in learning have found that “70 percent of learning and development takes place from real-life and on-the-job experiences, tasks, and problem solving; 20 percent of the time development comes from other people through informal or formal feedback, mentoring, or coaching; and 10 percent of learning and development comes from formal training.” — This might be true because formal training only takes place 10% of the time; mentoring 20% of the time, etc. Or it might be that formal training provides knowledge that is not measured by these statistics. Or, most disturbingly, it might be that formal training hasn’t been imparting knowledge that is in any way useful. That would not be a happy interpretation of the data from my perspective. My personal takeaway from this is that I try to provide students with many opportunities to create tasks that both are personally relevant to them and apply theories and frameworks from the class I am teaching. I also try to give personal feedback as much as possible and create opportunities for students to give and receive feedback among themselves (if possible for the class); I have found that both teaching other students and learning from other students also help students retain information.
Class as a context for experimenting
On p21: “The new social learning, which centers on information sharing, collaboration, and co-creation — not instruction — implies that the notion of training needs to expand.” — This is a good summary of my motivation for working on this class. It provides a context to test my theories of learning and teaching, to see which facets of these processes can work in a digital environment and which require a blended approach.
Application of knowledge as a means for remembering
On p22: “Knowledge acquired but never put to use is usually forgotten. We may act as if we care about learning something and go through the motions, but we will forget it unless it is something we want to learn and it fits how we work.” — As I have taught over the years, I have learned this again and again. (Have I mentioned that I have a thick skull?) The concept of “covering the material” is nearly a meaningless phrase. Unless a student interacts with the concept, makes it somehow personally meaningful, it will be forgotten. Just because the teacher says the words doesn’t mean that the student heard them, understood them, or will ever even remember that they were said. Design a course so that the student has time to apply the concepts in a meaningful context. It is best if the student can construct that context; otherwise, what is perceived as meaningful to the professor can end up being perceived as irrelevant or confusing by the student. Not good. The question for the professor becomes how to come up with a way of managing all these different contexts during the learning process. Again, another question for another blog post.
Conclusion
That’s it for now. (As if that wasn’t enough, huh?)
As I said, this post is in no way a summary of the book, or even of this chapter. I hope it does, in some way, encourage you to read this book for yourself; as you can tell, I feel it has been worth my time. I would love to hear your take on some of the points above. I’m struggling with a lot of concepts, and juggling lots of balls. I need some of you to help me think through all of this.