Saturday, 15 September 2012

The beginning of an adventure


It’s been a bit quiet in my blog lately but that doesn’t mean I have not been busy beavering away. I now have 11 participants in my social media based leadership development course! It’s a bit scary actually. 11 people with expectations of the awesomeness I am going to create – I cannot let them down.

People have also been really interested in what I am doing which is really cool. That is why I am going to dedicate my personal blog to the process of designing and delivering a leadership development course done entirely through social media.

So over the next 9 weeks or so I am going to write about my reflections on going through this process. Hopefully, those of you who read this will learn something. Here are some of my reflections so far.

Firstly, the course launches on the 24th September and I’d like to clone myself right now. It’s more because of a ‘timing’ rather than a ‘time’ issue though. What I mean is that my head is just spewing out these cool ideas, all at the same time and I’d really like to have another me sitting next to me, so she can work on one page and I can work on the other – that way we won’t miss any of the cool ideas.

Secondly, it’s quite a fine line between delivering content and facilitating learning. It’s very tempting to dump down all this information for me to deliver to participants – mostly so I can feel like I am giving them value. Providing value through content is so much easier to do then standing back and saying “I’m not going to tell you anything, you have to find it out for yourself”. But this is what the course is built upon. It’s not about telling people about their leadership – it is facilitating the discovery of their leadership. You cannot deliver content to do this. The whole point of using social media as a learning tool is for people to discover the content for themselves.

That’s a hard one for me to get my head around. So right now I am working through how much information to NOT provide. It’s bit risky and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about it. It’s hard to measure the value of this course when I’m very much putting it in the hands of the participants and not holding on to it myself.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the role of social media as a learning tool. Would you feel comfortable facilitating something intangible? 

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