Building a virtual PLN, or Personal, Learning, Network has been talked about a lot, because a PLN has great power for improving your professional learning and career. In fields where there is SO much to keep up with (like ours), it is increasingly important to build and maintain a group of worldwide colleagues who you can call on because it is literally impossible to stay abreast of all of the different aspects of your field yourself. So it order to stay on top of things, most of us need a PLN!
Here’s a simple definition for a PLN that I truly like: n. – the entire collection of people with whom you engage and exchange information, usually online. (http://onceateacher.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/pln-your-personal-learning-network-made-easy/) Kate Klingensmith, the author of the blog that provided that definition, lists some of the most common tools for building your PLN, such as Twitter, which may be one of the most well-known tools for building your PLN.
Simply put, PLNs are about building relationships with people that can help you learn and grow. The idea is to share ideas, insights, practices, links, and resources, and gain trust so that over time you can share and perhaps collaborate. It is a way to greatly extend your learning in order to harness the knowledge and experiences of many people through your connections with others. If done via social media, however, this requires creating social connections through virtual means, and this requires some forethought and planning. Social media tools are not enough to create connection. Just because there’s a tool doesn’t mean you’re going to have a connection with other people. You have to DO something to make a connection happen. Another aspect that some people do not think much about with PLNs is reciprocity. Some people lurk only or ask for things only. The social contract says that when we take, we must also give.
If PLNs are a new idea, below are some starting links. Read and come ready to discuss some DOs and DON’Ts. We will likely have a mix of people with little and LOTS of experience so we expect a lively and perhaps very spirited discussion!
For this week’s post, we’re delighted to have thoughts shared by Julian Stodd embedded within our discussion post. Julian is heavily involved in the development of e-learning and blended learning solutions, working at a strategic level with global clients to understand how their learning needs can be met. To read more about Julian, see his blog here.
Image courtesy of and copyrighted by Julian Stodd, used with permission.
As professionals in the field of learning and development, we frequently engage in online social media to learn new things, find new resources, discuss new approaches, discover new technologies, and generally improve ourselves to better meet the challenges we face today.
But are we using our social tools for maximum benefit? How effectively are we using them to increase the size and diversity of our team when creating a new program or improving an existing one? Consider a few of these truths in our business today:
Our customer’s expectations seem to rise relative to resources available
Approaches to facilitating learning continue to expand and diversify, and no one of us is expert in all of them [JS: Yes, this brings to mind the importance of piloting new approaches rather than committing to huge projects in untested methodologies. Don't let technology lead the drive, it's about mindset. This may be relevant: http://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/informal-technology-social-learning/]
A variety of solutions may meet any given need, but do we know which is best?
We’ve all been in this situation: faced with a deadline, there’s just not enough time to think through all the options or evaluate every alternative. We probably don’t have a team diverse enough to always think well outside the box to assure that (1) our concept of how to meet a particular need is appropriate and (2) that our planned design will be effective. This is especially true when doing something we and our team have never done before. The good news is there’s probably someone somewhere who has done it before–we just need to find them.
Some of us turn to our social networks for help, while others don’t or can’t – discussing plans in public places may not be appropriate in many situations. But another important place to turn to early in any development cycle – at the concept and planning stages – are online communities. There are dozens of such communities in the field of learning and development, virtually all free to join, and they’re populated by thousands or tens of thousands of members who work in the same field.
How have you used your networks to improve your products and services? Are you among the tens of thousands of members in online communities? If so, how do they work for you? Join us Thursday, May 2 at 16:00BST/11:00EDT/08:00PDT to share your thoughts and discuss this further!
I was brought up in a culture where storytelling was an important way of communicating between the generations. My grandfather was an injured war veteran. For a young man born of the Catholic faith in Northern Ireland this was unusual. He told truly amazing and inspiring stories of how he enlisted at the age of 16, whilst the actual recruitment age was 18. His stories of perseverance, teamwork and working hard to understand others shaped how I now think about life and work.
I am fascinated by the power of the story to really break though our adult learning barriers of “the curse of knowledge”, or in other words, cognitive bias. By the time we reach a certain age and level of experience in life and work, learning new things may take more work than we all realise.
How can we use stories for learning?
Over the past 10 years, I’ve had the privilege to work as the lead Instructional Designer in the development of a learning portal for the Irish Heath Service. The portal – http://www.hseland.ie has been developed by Mr. Pat Kenny in partnership with Belfast based eLearning company AurionLearning. They have 60,000+ registered users with thriving communities across different healthcare disciplines, including Nursing, Mental Health Services and Allied Healthcare Professionals (Physiotherapists, Speech Therapists etc.).
Pat, a trained social worker, is currently working to collate and record stories from both patients and clinicians for use as core learning content within the portal. Listen to his views on the value and impact of stories to bring about change and learning.
Stories as a tool for personal and professional reflection
As Pat explains, in health and social care education, patient stories have gained important recognition as a reflection tool for both patients and clinicians. Patients who experience sudden and acute, or on-going chronic illness, for example, often report losing themselves in the system – losing a sense of their individuality and just becoming a mere disease or condition. Someone recently diagnosed with cancer becomes a cancer patient or someone recently suffering a stroke becomes a stroke victim. By forgetting the human being at the heart of the disease or condition, clinicians can often focus on the disease rather than working with the patient in a more holistic manner. Encouraging both patients and healthcare professionals to tell stories of their experiences within the healthcare system can help both to better understand and communicate with each other.
So, why are stories important?
If you drive a car, chances are that you know and UNDERSTAND the rules of the road. But does that mean you never break the speed limit? No – it doesn’t. Unfortunately for the families who suffer loss at the hands of people who may only be a few km/per hour over that limit, their stories become important lessons for us all. To foster long term behaviour and attitude change, we sometimes must go beyond merely understanding the facts. Stories can put us in touch with emotion and empathy, which can play an important role in learning. Sparking an emotional reaction can also make learning stick.
Using stories in workplace learning
So where and how might we use stories in workplace learning? With L&D’s current emphasis on just in time learning and performance support, does storytelling really have a place?
I suppose if I was in a hurry to answer a specific question, such as what is the procedure for ensuring that I protect a customer’s data, the last thing I’d want is a “story”. Do I really need to hear from a customer talking about how they were impacted by a company handling their data poorly? In many cases, no – but what if your workforce had continually been trained on data protection, yet data protection breaches were still happening?
I think the real power of stories lies in helping us to uncover tacit knowledge. Or to put it more simply, we all know more than we think we do. We are all a product of our experiences and we all have wisdom to share. I don’t have all the answers just yet as to how stories can be used effectively in workplace learning. My experience of healthcare education tells me that stories can be a powerful learning and communication tool. It is certainly something worth exploring.
Please join us to discuss Using Stories in learning, on Thursday 18th April at 16:00 BST / 11:00EDT / 08:00 PDT
Look forward to seeing you there!
Podcast by:
Pat Kenny, National eLearning Manager,
Health Service Executive, Ireland
It’s 2013 and we have more ways to engage learners than ever before. But do we know what our colleagues really want from L&D?
This question is not meant to be facetious. On the contrary, the aim of the question is to challenge the pre-conceptions of learning professionals.
From the first work on learning styles 30 years ago, we’ve understood that people like to learn in different ways and that we should adapt to their needs. Nowadays we are more likely to be discussing the generational differences that influence what our staff actually want and prefer when it comes to learning and work.
We understand that the decision-making baby boomers in business are traditionally motivated by prestige, they are comfortable in working in hierarchies where knowledge is power and nervous of technologies that they don’t understand. One the other hand, we also hear that the tech savvy millennial is more motivated by meaningful work, collaboration and community and won’t tolerate traditional ways of learning. And we’re told that the L&D professional had better be ready!
Armed with this knowledge about our learners we should be better equipped than ever to create learner centric programmes that put individuals into the driving seat of their own destiny. After all we’ve got the technologies and tools and models to help make this a reality.
So how are we doing?
According to this year’s Towards Maturity Benchmark, L&D professionals believe they are opening up choices for individual, with 7 out of 10 providing learning management systems packed full of any time any where online e-learning.
But are we giving our colleagues what they want? This year’s benchmark is also showing that almost all of us are looking to increase sharing within the organisation yet often our communities are like ghost towns – not even the collaborative millennial are gathering there.
What is holding us back? L&D professionals believe that whilst they are trying to create learning that improves engagement, employees themselves are holding them back with over 50% citing reluctance by users to learning, with new technology as a barrier to change.
In our research we’ve seen staff reluctance as the number one barrier to change for a few years and we are beginning to wonder why. Part of the problem may lie in the fact that we aim to put learners in the driving seat but most of the time we remain firmly in control telling them what is available, and where and when they can and should do it.
Another reason might be that we are perhaps projecting some of our own concerns onto our staff, making assumptions about their wants and needs based on our standard training needs analysis and happy sheets.
I fear that we are also making assumptions about how they want to learn based on the new generational labels that we are applying.
It’s time to challenge our assumptions.
We need to start to understand that our staff are not millennial, gen X or baby boomers, neither are they reflectors, activists or other learning labels. They are individuals – doctors, project managers, engineers, train drivers and civil servants – and they probably all react differently in different situations.
And it’s not just millennials who are tech savvy now. When it comes to bring your own devices into the workplace – the biggest ‘culprits’ are senior managers – 77% of them bring their own technology into the workplace. Did you know that 65% of Facebook users and 55% of Twitter now are aged 35 or over?
All these stats have the potential to do our heads in! So, what is the truth about what our learners really want?
Please join us to discuss What Learners Want, on Thursday 04 April at 16:00 BST / 11:00EDT / 08:00 PDT
We are delighted to welcome Dave Kelly as our guest blogger this week to talk about reflecting on learning.
This chat has taken place; view the chat transcript here the next #chat2lrn will be on Thursday 4 April, 08.00PST/11.00EST/16.00GMT
I’ve just returned from the Learning Solutions Conference in Orlando. It was three great days chock-full of lots of learning content from a great number of really smart people. I love conferences, and learn a lot while attending them. However, I’ve always felt that the most important part of the conference experience isn’t the conference itself; it’s what you do afterwards.
Reflection is a critical part of our learning process, and yet it’s something we rarely build into the learning programs we design. Reflection provides an individual the opportunity to process the experience and build connections between new knowledge and existing knowledge. That opportunity to pause, to reflect on the learning and build context within our own experiences is hugely powerful.
Whenever I attend a conference (or any significant learning experience) I try to allocate time over the next day or so to pause and reflect on what I’ve learned and consider what it is I will be doing differently as a result.
Two important points: I always try to schedule time within a day or so of the experience. Reflecting quickly is important, as it’s very easy to go back into the office and fall immediately back into our routines. Try to set aside some time to pause and think about what the most important things you learned about from the experience were, and how you can use that knowledge in your work.
The second point? Document and share what you have learned. This is a natural part of reflecting. It not only helps those you share your knowledge with, it also helps to better clarify and contextualize the learning for yourself. Share your reflections with your co-workers, your peers, and with the community at large (using the conference hashtag, if applicable).
Reflection is a hugely important part of the learning process. I think we, as learning professionals, need to provide more opportunities for reflection in the learning experiences we build. We tend to dump content without providing opportunities for reflection, and we need to change that. It’s through reflection that context is built, and it’s through context that learning becomes meaningful.
Please join us to discuss reflection on our own learning, and getting to action, on Thursday 21 March at 16.00 GMT and North America DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME CHANGE ALERT :: 12.00EDT/09.00PDT ::
Learning is inherently social1, and social media offer exciting opportunities for people to learn. Members of the learning and development (L&D) community increasingly embrace this for their own informal learning and networking, but using social media effectively in formal learning activities can be more of a challenge.
The potential advantages are tremendous, including extending interaction and learning opportunities over time, reaching into the workplace, putting learning activities in the context of work, reducing or eliminating classroom time, and empowering learners to participate at the time and place that’s most convenient for them. Online social media used in training also promises an opportunity to sustain relationships started in formal programs with the hope of developing self-supporting online communities of individuals with common training experiences.
For many workplaces, there’s another important issue to address: will the social medium or media used be public (outside the firewall) or private (behind the firewall)? This isn’t a trivial question, and both the subject matter and the nature of the organization play roles in answering it.
Outside the firewall
There are tremendous advantages to using public media. A few include:
Ease of administration: the media are managed by an outside entity and typically accessed using a standard Web browser
Low cost: most public social media can be used at no cost
Ease of use: most of us learn how to use social media with little guidance
Access to far-reaching networks: with public social media, it’s possible to reach experts in most fields of study with a simple request
Large pool of individuals to learn from: you’re not limited to the participants in a given training activity and can draw on support from personal networks developed over time
To help protect their intellectual capital and proprietary information, a great many organizations in the world have policies that prevent employees from sharing work in the public domain without prior authorization. In these cases, each individual who engages in public media must abide by company policies regarding the specific content being shared. In some cases, private spaces within public social media (a private YouTube channel for example) may be viable options.
Behind the firewall
When workplace training involves activities that are relevant to students’ work, the artifacts created (discussions, papers, presentations, and more) are often work products. Public social media often can’t be used for this type of training. If an online social medium is used, it must be private. In addition to increased cost and administration requirements, this also results in a substantially smaller social network than possible outside the firewall.
As long as the formal learning activity (course) is underway and participants engage with one another in relevant ways over a period of time, many of the advantages of using social media in learning can still be realized. Learning does reach the workplace, in the context of work. It also reduces classroom time and empowers participants to engage at the time and place most convenient for them. But the substantially smaller network of individuals in the workplace makes ongoing interaction between students unlikely. The promise of self-sustaining communities is difficult to realize in all but the largest organizations.
This chat has taken place; view the chat transcript here the next #chat2lrn will be on Thursday 7 March, 08.00PST/11.00EST/16.00GMT
For those of us lucky enough to have the budget available to attend a conference or two for professional development each year, there can be a great deal of stress and anxiety involved in choosing the right one to attend. Budgets are tight. Time is tight. You want to make sure you are attending the conference that can give you the biggest bang for your buck and is worth the time spent away from your desk where the work continues to pile up.
But how do you make the choice? Do you only attend conferences hosted by respected organizations in the US such as ASTD and the eLearning Guild or if you are in the UK the LPI or CIPD? Or is your choice driven by advertised content that may help you solve a challenge back at your job? Or perhaps your boss needs representation at a certain conference and chooses for you.
Conferences can be amazing professional development opportunities in the Learning and Development industry, but they can also be decidedly underwhelming. Costs for conference registration, travel, hotel and other expenses can easily reach several thousand dollars, so the choice you make is important.
In addition, with the increasing influence of the Twitter backchannel, many people can now choose to attend conferences virtually. Does this offer better value for money or are we deluding ourselves with a watered down experience?
At #chat2lrn, we would like to hear about your experiences choosing and attending conferences in our industry. Join us on Thursday, February 21 16.00GMT/11.00EST/08.00PST to chat about how you approach the dilemma of choosing the right conference to attend.
To help you get started thinking about this topic, I’ve provided links to several of the major* conferences held each year in the U.S. and the U.K.
Podcast by:
@LauraOverton
http://towardsmaturity.org
