Facilitating social learning

We’re now in week three of the social media leadership course. There has been a lot of enthusiasm for the course from participants that has been absolutely wonderful. However, I am now a pattern that is not uncommon with traditional forms of training.

You get the star performers who actively participate and don’t require any pushing or follow up, those that are lurking in the background and will get what they need to get done done but at the last possible minute and those that you don’t hear anything from and, despite follow up, you don’t really know how they are doing.

It is the last two categories that are the hardest to engage. Particularly when you’re not face to face with these people. One of the ways I’ve worked with this in the past is to encourage the managers of training participants to engage with their people around their learning. This requires taking on a coaching role – what is going well? What is not going well? What are you learning? This is a potential option if I were to do the course again, but maybe they nominate a coach who engages with them through social media? Oooh this could be someone who has done the course already, thus giving the ‘coach’ ongoing development as well (thinking out loud).

The biggest challenge in engaging learners through social media is the facilitation of the course. The point is not to provide the participants with content by way of information about the topic, but to encourage them to seek it out for themselves. Some are very adept at this, some not so much. Some of my facilitation has worked well, some not so much. Although it is very tempting to provide the information, I’ve scaled back the amount of information I provide. Several participants have stepped up to the plate to feed information to the twitter stream and this has been fantastic. I have also started doing weekly tweet chats, to provide a time and place for the sharing of ideas – this seems to be working really well. Tweet chats are Tuesdays at 7pm, if you’d like to join us.

However, there is one thing in particular that I would do differently right from the start of the course and that is to provide a lot more information about how blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn works as learning tools. I think I’ve picked up the learning potential of them quite intuitively, as I think a couple of participants in my course have. But it is not really obvious to everyone unless you’re that way inclined. So I’m going to put together some guides on how to use social media for learning.

There are some really great resources out there already on how to use Twitter (see Kirsti Grant from Social Sauce) and how to write blogs (see Tanja Gardner from Crystal Clarity Copywriting) but not much from the perspective of “how do I learn from social media?”

Watch this space J