Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Using Social Media for Learning

I had been hoping to gather a number of key stakeholders within my organisation to pitch to them in relation to the use of Social Media Technologies for both knowledge management and learning, however the first available date to gather them all together for the 2-3 hours that I needed was the 04th January 2011!!!

A great suggestion was made to me that I actually deliver some of my ‘pitch’ using the very media tools that I was hoping to gather support for in bringing to my organisation. The negative aspects of social media unfortunately grab the headlines more so than the positive effects, therefore it was my intention to bring to their attention the positive aspects of using Social Media Technologies. I was intending to use a wide-ranging number of tools including the very Blog you are reading now, You Tube, Twitter, Delicious, a ‘members only’ social-networking site and Facebook, however a number of those tools are blocked by our IT security policy so I was unable to fully demonstrate their effectiveness (I think they call that a vicious circle!) To begin with I intended to show them a short film entitled Social Media Revolution 2

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng]

I have recently seen Peter Butler (Head of Learning at BT) speak extremely passionately on their internal use of a Knowledge Management platform which they have christened ‘Dare2Share’. The footage below, shows a great examples of how a collaborative platform has benefited BT.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtVYkEdGtfo]

The image you can see below is actually a PowerPoint slideshow that I have inserted into a tool called ‘SlideShare’. This tool then allows me to embed the show inside a webpage, as you can see below. This slideshow is only 11 slides long and will go some way towards demonstrating the change in mindset in terms of using social media tools for learning that there is that there has been within the wider global population and the potential ‘disconnect’ that we may be guilty of causing amongst future employees.

[slideshare id=4339355&doc=usingsocialmediaforlearning-100528023309-phpapp01]

During the above SlideShare I mentioned a social bookmarking site called ‘Delicious’ and promised visibility of my Delicious bookmark account, here it is, please feel free to click on any of the links and see what I have been researching. Imagine the power of this type of application within a Project Team who are all collaborating and undertaking research towards a common goal… The first two clips that I showed above were from YouTube, however as you could see these were created by other people/organisations. The clip below was created by me and uploaded to YouTube. I created this footage in order to update our e-learning authors on some pending changes to our e-learning authoring software. To type the update within an email would have been time-consuming (and probably quite boring to read!) however by talking to people in a ‘virtual’ manner, I believe it bridged the gap between numerous face-to-face meetings and a dry email – the feedback received by the recipients was very encouraging. Imagine that this footage was of a technician disconnecting ‘Valve A’ from ‘Pump B’… what a great Knowledge Management tool! Obviously the content shouldn’t sit in the public domain i.e. YouTube, but would need to be more secure. In essence our own organisations version of BTs Dare2Share model.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVfOp2CxFI0]


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