Leveraging Social Software for Learning

On March 29 I posted the below question on LinkedIn.

How are people using social software to support learning?

I think most of us agree that there is an important social dimension to learning. But in what ways do social software applications such as LinkedIn and FaceBook help people to learn? I am an active FaceBook user (but only with friends and family) and am making more use of LinkedIn, but I don't find either particularly effective in supporting my learning or the small circles of people that I learn with. Am I missing something? I do find Wikipedia to be a powerful learning tool, one that I access almost everyday and for which I write at least two or three articles a year. But this mostly a solitary activity, except on those few occasions that a useful discussion erupts. Social tagging systems like del.icio.us and CrowdTurust seem to have more potential as social learning tools, but my gut feeling is that they have not yet flowered for this use. So, how are people using social media to enhance their own and their group's learning? 

You can find the question and the thread of answers here.

If you parse this out, the question is self referential, as it was an attempt to learn over LinkedIn while asking a question about Learning on LinkedIn! In this sense, anyway, the question answered itself. LinkedIn did help me learn, and it helped me to learn when I consciously used it to do so.

So what did I learn? Before digging into this I want to take a quick look at who answered the question. Last Sunday (March 29, 2009) I used LinkedIn’s ‘Ask a Question’ function to send the above question to 200 people on my network. I skipped people that I work with everyday at LeveragePoint and Monitor Group and made sure that as many people as possible in my network who are interested in learning, performance support, knowledge management and social media were recipients.

	On Linked In		Direct                Total
	Public	Private
1 st Degree	19	2	5
2 nd Degree	4
Other	2
Total	25	2	5	32
Response Rate	16.0%
On Linked In	13.5%
Direct	2.5%
Public	12.5%
Private	3.5%
Total	200

In my question I mentioned LinkedIn, FaceBook, Wikipedia, del.icio.us and CrowdTrust. It was interesting to see what other applications were mentioned in people’s responses and how often they were mentioned (these numbers are of course skewed by the applications mentioned in the question itself). My taxonomy is a bit arbitrary here, but hopefully suggestive.

Currently Popular Community Applications        11

                Facebook                                                            4

                MySpace                                                             1

                LinkedIn                                                              4

                Jigsaw                                                                  1

                YouTube                                                              1

Wikis                                                                                    10

                MediaWiki                                                          2

                Semantic MediaWiki                                        3

                Wikipedia                                                           2

                Zoho                                                                     1

                Confluence                                                          1

                SocialText                                                            1

Social Tagging                                                                   7

                Del.icio.us                                                           1

                CrowdTrust                                                         2

                Flickr                                                                    2

                Twine                                                                    2

Blogging Applications                                                    4

                Blogger                                                                 2

                Typepad                                                               1

                Wordpress                                                          1

Social Messaging                                                             3

                Twitter                                                                 3

Virtual Worlds                                                                 3

                SecondLife                                                          3

Legacy                                                                                2

                FirstClass                                                            1

                Learning Management Systems                       1

There were a few surprises for me here. On the positive side, Jon Husband had a compelling argument for blogs that I will discuss below, Lorraine Chisholm, Reg Nordman and Norman Birnbach all had good stories to tell about learning using Twitter and our friends at IBM (Michael Littlejohn and Chuck Hamilton) made a strong case creating collaborative learning environments inside SecondLife (something IBM excels at). On the other hand, I was surprised that no one mentioned instant messaging and Skype as a good way to support learning (I was with a client recently who wants to have IM integrated into its learning solutions) and I was disappointed that there was no discussion of social search as a mode of learning (I am thinking of applications like Wikia Search).

So, what did I learn? The most important thing is the most obvious. You get out of a community what you invest into it, and this is especially true when you want to learn socially. This is why I found Jon Husband’s response so compelling. He pointed out that good bloggers understand that they are part of a community and that they are engaged in conversations with other members of their community. And the best blogging platforms (such as Blogger, Typepad and Wordpress) provide functions such as Trackback and Comments that support the creation of these communities.

The biggest surprise for me was the way in which Twitter is supporting learning. Three very different people all called this out: Lorraine was a software engineer with a fine arts background and is now a user experience designer, while Reg Nordman is a consultant with a focus on sales and Norm Birnbach is a public relations guy who makes excellent use of social media tools in his own work.

Lorraine Chisholm’s comments…

“For example, recently the IxDA had a conference in Vancouver that had a very useful twitter stream. I have found that following the right people leads to a wealth of material and insights that have catalyzed my professional development. The beauty of this is that you are always discovering new colleagues to follow and trimming others to create your own customized and finely tuned stream. Good control over signal to noise ratio. I was a total Twitter skeptic, but it turned out to be a very useful and inspiring tool, once I grokked it.”

Norman Birnbach’s comments…

“We've been using Twitter as a learning tool. Beyond participating on Twitter itself, which has been useful (and has led to a couple of media placements as well as a better understanding of what reporters are interested in), there is Twitter's culture: you get and maintain followers by being informative. We've found lots of useful articles, blog posts, and podcasts, which we circulate among the team, and often discuss as a team. In return, we provide useful links and insights to people following us on Twitter.”

Reg Nordman’s comments…

“I have discovered that the numerous twitter aggregations (ie tweetdeck) that allow you to run multiple live searches on key words etc is very useful to my directed research. 
e.g. lead generation articles, fuel cell news, and so on.”

Reg’s comment was especially thought provoking as I began playing with Oneriot this week. This is a Twitter search engine that tracks URLs in tweets and then goes out and builds a rich index based on these URLs. This gives a much richer idea of the conversation than an index of the tweets alone could provide.

Then I got thrown a curve ball from David Vogt. David is a physicist by training and is exceptionally skilled at applying physics metaphors to the phase shift that is happening in learning. In his own words,

“Your question leans on a 'classical' model of learning - just when the web is enabling us to harness learning in 'quantum' terms. 

Consider "my learning" as a set of 'interest vectors' entangled with broader societal interest vectors. Both sets are evolving. There's a strange loop relationship between them. 

Entanglement is where the money is. For example, I learn a lot from reading the New York Times because it does a great job of amplifying social interest vectors, even though I'll never be able to unravel the people and research that makes them a great amplifier. I also learn a lot from Google because I can specify one of my interest vectors with a few keywords and it always feeds me something fresh. 

Similarly, my "value" rests with my ability to amplify the resonances between my individual vectors and those of society (for example, a great blog may synthesize two or three of my vectors). A learner's problem has always been that amplifying personal entanglements is hard work. Facebook and LinkedIn provide very low ROI. And all available amplifiers are analog (rarely amplifying more than one vector at a time). 

Properly done, web2 should make entanglement fully digital, and fully in my control. “

There were a few answers from people in the academic world as well. Richard Smith at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver pointed out that most young people (i) don’t have the networks of experts they need to get their questions answered and (ii) do not necessarily know how to frame questions so that they will get good responses. This may well be true (but see Kyle Dionne-Clark’s response, Kyle is in third year at McGill in Montreal). Given this, one of the skills we need to support (and not just with students) is the learning of how to build a network of diverse experts who can help one to learn, how to ask questions of this network, and how to make sure you provide value back.

Looking at my own use of these tools in learning, wikis and social tagging have been key. My company makes extensive use of Semantic MediaWiki both in its applications and as an internal learning tool. I use Semantic MediaWiki as a learning tool everyday. I also use one or another of the social tagging systems everyday. These applications suit my personal learning style, which I have characterized elsewhere as Abstract, Historical, Written, Modeling, Social.

So here are my ‘working rules’ on how to leverage social software to amplify learning.

1.  Invest in your network, engage in conversations, ask and answer questions, share resources.

2. Use the applications that suit your own learning style. In my case, it is the ability to make and discover connections that makes social tagging and wikis so compelling, and the ability to model and think using models that makes semantic technologies useful.

3. Blend different applications to create new communities and experiences. I use social tagging and semantic wikis together. Other people are making excellent use of Twitter and Facebook, or blogs and social search. There is no one application that will suit all of our needs.

               

 

Comments

[Norman Birnbach]

Interesting post. Regarding your three conclusions, some of these sites do work for lurkers -- people who look for information from the sidelines (i.e. without offering information). But I think you do get more if you engage than if your lurk. Some of my exchanges on other people's blog and on Twitter have sharpened my thinking.

The second point is important (and is often overlooked, I think) because not only is there no one way to learn, there's no one platform to get all the information you need, especially if you have work friends on LinkedIn and family on Facebook.

Your third point will require new tools to help combine applications and communities.