Social learning - an evolution

I have been doing a lot of work these past couple of weeks on a leadership development course I am piloting that is done entirely using social media (although I still have A LOT of work to do). So I’m going to kill two birds with one stone this week. I needed to write an introduction to the course, explaining what we were doing and why we were doing it that way. I was a bit stuck for ideas on how to do this. It makes entire sense to me, but how do I convey that to people who are new to it? My breakthrough moment came when a good friend of mine (thanks Heather!!) sent me through some links to stuff written by a guy called Harold Jarche who is very much in the social learning space – this inspired me. So here goes, my (first draft) introduction to the ‘Leadership development using social media course’:

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Welcome to the very first course in New Zealand on leadership, done entirely through social media. You probably don’t really know how this is all going to pan out, and quite frankly neither do I, but what an exciting journey! I’d like to thank you for taking this leap of faith with me and, whatever happens, I think we are all going to learn a lot along the way.

I’m going to explain to you what social learning is all about, why we are doing this and how it works.

Social learning is about connecting with others to share and make sense of information. This course has some framework around it. There are topics we will examine each week, but it will otherwise by fluid. You can expect it to be complex and evolving.  Hey, but you are the experts here.

With rapid changes in technology, information is now being widely accessible and not owned by any one person. Do you remember encyclopedias? And how expensive they were? Now we have Wikipedia and people are sharing this information for free! I believe that all learning will be free one day. The skill will be in how we seek out, analyze and condense this information.

This course is putting the learning into your own hands. I won’t be giving you the answers. More likely, I will be asking you a lot of questions. It is up to you to find, share and reflect on information around leadership.  The key element is for you to communicate with each other. There are no rules here. But I do want you to keep in mind the fundamental principles of communication. It’s a two-way street- you speak and you listen.

Your first week in this course is all about setting you up in the foundations of the course, using social media for learning. So let’s get into it.

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Yes, still a lot more work to do and I’m probably going to be pushing out the start date because I also committed to writing a research article, but what exciting stuff. Do you want to join me on the journey?