Learning Conversations

The world of social software is large, diverse and complex. There are a multitude of applications that sit within this space. Some of these are single purpose applications, such as Twitter, Wordpress, Google Docs, Google Reader etc. Some are multi-purpose, such as Facebook, Elgg and Moodle.

This post is not about how to choose the right application. I wrote about that earlier this year (Top tips for choosing and using social software), and Jane Hart's directory of software is probably the most useful starting place.

Instead, this post is about how to start making use of social software to support learning.

I'm assuming that you have some responsibility for leading learning (whatever that means) in an organisation. It could be a corporate learning & development department, a Higher Education institution, a commercial training company or a school.

You've recognised the value that the social element brings to learning. Probably through reading papers or books from the leading thinkers in this field such as George Siemens (Connectivism), Etienne Wenger (Communities of Practice), and Stephen Downes (Elearning 2.0).

You've now been charged with introducing these ideas into your organisation. Probably as a pilot project, with a small group of people.

Where do you start? Where are the pitfalls to watch out for? What will help or hinder you?

Start with the person

Most social software projects start with the aim of encouraging creativity, knowledge sharing and collaboration.

This is to be achieved by providing tools that allow people to make connections with each other, collaborate on work and share knowledge.

Often, very little thought is given to how those tools will actually be used, how the individuals concerned will learn how to use them, what motivation they will have to use them, and how that motivation will be sustained.

For successful social learning projects we must remember that we're dealing with people, with needs, desires, other priorities, and varying levels of confidence.

Social learning starts with the individual. It's the individual who chooses to contribute. It's the individual who learns. It's the individual who makes connections to other individuals. Only then, through those connections can the group, the organisation, learn and change.

So, rather than immediately putting people into a collaborative environment, expecting them to create knowledge together, my recommendation would always be to take it steady, and start with demonstrating the usefulness of social learning to the individual. Of course, if you're working with a group that is already motivated to generate knowledge collaboratively, then you can bypass a lot of this.

It's all about syndication

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the glue that holds individuals together on the web. It's the means by which I can write a blog post and get a comment on it a few minutes later. It's the means by which I can read the content from dozens of websites without having to waste time physically going to the site. Instead of having to have everyone inside one giant system, like Facebook, RSS allows each individual to have their own personal space, working just as they want it to, yet still be connected to other people.

Think of RSS as just like the way cartoonists syndicate their work to newspapers. Every time they create a new cartoon, they put it in a central place from which those subscribing newspapers pick it up to republish in their pages.

When I write a post here, it goes into a pot (my RSS feed). All those people who have chosen to subscribe to my feed have software which regularly checks to see if there's anything new in the feed. If there is, their software takes the content of the feed and publishes it in that person's feedreader.

So, my starting place would be to encourage the learners you work with to:

• Find one or two people who are writing regular blogs in your field (use Google's Blog Search if you don't know any, even better ask someone you trust to recommend blogs to you)
• Subscribe to their RSS feeds in a feed reader. There are many of these. I use Google Reader, as it's web-based. I can then keep up with my feeds from any internet-connected computer.

As you read people's blogs, they will link to other people, who you may also wish to subscribe to. Over time that list of subscriptions will change, as your interests and priorities change. It may sometimes need pruning, or even starting again. What you're doing is building up a trusted network from whom you can learn.

This learning network can include many types of content:

• Text-based blogs
• Presentations (eg. on Slideshare)
• Video (eg. on Youtube)
• Audio podcasts
• Job adverts
• etc

You don't just have to subscribe to an individual person's feed. Many of these sites provide feeds for content that has been categorised or tagged in a particular way. Some let you create personal searches that then deliver an RSS feed. You can even set up a Google blog or news search that delivers an RSS feed everytime something new appears in the search results.

The feed reader allows you to quickly scan, and then sort content for stuff that is then relevant to you. It becomes the starting point for your Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system. Harold Jarche is a well-known advocate of the concept of the PKM and has a series of excellent posts that describe his particular way of working.

Start to contribute

Most people that put their knowledge "out there" do so for one or more of these reasons:

• To synthesise and crystallise their own thoughts
• To gain feedback on their thoughts, thus refining them
• To share knowledge in the expectation/hope that it will help other people
• To prove a level of expertise in a subject

Most allow people to provide feedback through the use of comments on the content. For this you have to actually go to item in question and add your comment in a box below the content. By doing so you are then contributing to the original author's understanding of the content. You might provide negative feedback, which may challenge their thinking. This happened to me recently. Just take a look at the comments on my post on Education Reform. Or you might provide positive feedback which reaffirms their thinking. Or you may just respond with a question which would encourage them to clarify and re-explain.

Taking part in this conversation is just like being at a conference with strangers. You start off as the new person in the room. Over time, listening in to different conversations you gradually get a feel for how the group talks about things. You learn the language. You get to know who the characters are, and the experts to whom others are listening and referring. Eventually you gain enough confidence to ask a question within the group, or even posit your own opinion. It's a big step, but an important one. It's at that point that you will then start moving from being on the periphery to moving towards the centre.

Your knowledge is important

Having gained the confidence to participate in the community of practice, I would then encourage my learners to create their own space in which they can synthesise, gain feedback, share knowledge and prove expertise. Initially the primary motivation for this is likely to simply be to have a central space for keeping the ideas they are learning about.

That could just be a set of annotated bookmarks (using, for example, Diigo or Delicious), but it may need to develop into a personal learning journal (aka blog) - perhaps hosted on Blogger, Edublogs or Wordpress.com, or on their own server (my choice) or on their organisation's servers. The latter would be my least preferred option, as then the blog becomes seen as part of the organisation rather than something that's of benefit for the individual.

How you use your blog is up to you. Initially mine began as a place to store links to other sites, particularly ones which I thought my colleagues would find useful. It has now developed into the place where I continually reflect on what I'm learning and try to crystallise those thoughts into writing that will be of use to other people. Having a product and an audience to aim for is essential for my own learning process.

Maintaining connections and collaborating

Having your own online space means that other people in your community of practice then have a place to link to. You become an integral part of the network.

The aim of all Connectivist learning activity is to maintain those links, to ensure that the knowledge you receive and create is current and relevant. Connections will diminish or increase in importance. Your community of practice may change over time as your own expertise develops and needs different types of input.

To maintain your connections it's important to:

1. Regularly prune, organise and sort your feeds - the people you read, watch or listen to
2. Continually reflect on what you're learning and put those reflections into the community for comment and further refinement

Communities of practice with strong links are ideally placed to undertake collaborative activities. It is these communities that have the motivation to create products of their shared knowledge.

The educational technology community provides many excellent examples of collaboration in practice. For example, Vicki Davis and many other teachers collaborated on a presentation about using Google's Presentation tool in the classroom. She then reflected on it on her blog post: And the walls came down.

Also take a look at Doug Belshaw's post about the "Learning Ecosystem" at his new school.

You may find that you can jump straight to online collaboration if you already have a strong face-to-face community of practice, defined by Wenger as:

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

Most groups of people do not have the confidence in their own knowledge, in their peers, and in the software tools to be able to leap to this step. It takes a lot to be able to add your own ideas to someone else's work, and even more to take someone else's words and change them. Our whole culture of education is currently predicated on each individual producing work that is then critiqued by an expert. We are not encouraged to think of ourselves as experts, on an equal footing with our peers.

Conclusion

Collaborative learning requires both the "teacher" and the "learner" to take very different roles from that which they're used to. Such culture change takes time, patience and lots and lots of gentle encouragement.

There will be set backs. Many of them will be related to the ease of use (or not) of the software tools, and many will be caused by lack of motivation and confidence. Getting those sorted at the beginning of the project are essential for success. It's the first building block in Gilly Salmon's Five Stage Model for computer mediated communication, and rightly so.

I hope this post has been useful. It's based on personal experience. Your experiences may be very different. I'd love to hear about them.

Further reading

Gilly Salmon - Five Stage model for computer mediated communication. It mirrors closely the approach I'm taking here.
Terry Anderson and Donna Cameron - Collaborative Learning Activities Using Social Software Tools
Terry Anderson et al - Theory and Practice of Online Learning - free, online book.
Don Ledingham's Learning Journal - example of a public, personal learning journal produced by a senior manager in a Scottish local authority
Harold Jarche - overview of Personal Knowledge Management
Albert Laszlo Barabasi - Linked - The New Science of Networks
InfEd article on Communities of Practice
Stephen Downes - Should all learning professionals be blogging?