There has been a lot of talk about informal and social learning vs. formal learning. There is so much about it on the internet, that we wonder sometimes if formal learning has any sort of place in the future of learning at all. The fact hasn’t change, formal learning will exist in the future. There are a variety of reasons for it; but let’s just quickly delve into it a bit. With service industries ending up as major consumers of learning, the focus on knowledge is more pronounced, I sometimes feel it is the one key influence affecting the level of service a company can offer and profit from. The knowledge life-cycle is shortening, in some cases, products such as cars took five years or more to develop and roll-out.

Today, I’m going to adopt a contrarian view. We all know social networks promote learning; while the mechanisms aren’t documented or well-understood, that it works isn’t in doubt anymore. But we must ask, are the ‘social media/networking systems’ out there promoting this learning? Or does it happen in spite of these systems? Sure, lots of companies want to replicate ‘Facebook’ behind the firewall; safe from prying eyes, but open enough for employees to freely express themselves. They hope that by just implementing such a system learning will ‘happen’; does it?

Google Plus is making waves among technology savvy social networkers. Like so many other Google products, this one is in beta and is gradually opening up to more users. One unique aspect separates Plus from other Google services. Unlike Facebook or Twitter where one accesses the ‘firehose’ of data that one subscribes to and is dependent on the Friends/Following, and where users mostly use features like groups/lists etc to sort out noise from the stream, Plus uses a different approach and lets users create ‘circles’ that allow them to separate streams. This is a more manageable approach for dealing with the humongous amount of incoming data that social networks generate.

It’s been quite an interesting week on the Google front, with the launch of one new service after another. The one making the biggest waves (if you pardon the pun) has been Google+ (plus). Having wrangled an invite, I used it for a couple of hours. These are some first impressions.

It shouldn’t be surprising that I’m making lots of comparison to Facebook which is the defacto social networking standard right now.

The final list of top 100 tools for learning for 2010 is now out on Jane Hart’s website. I understand this list is more inclined towards tools that learning professionals use for their own learning as opposed to those used for creating learning programs or training sessions. I see great gains made by some of the tools while I have not even experienced them as yet.

A quick look at the top 10:

Everyone’s been talking about Social Learning Environments (SLEs), the internet offers a plethora of tools that could become a part of a SLE. While some of these tools cost money, the bulk of them are free. We can construct our very SLE using these free tools. Jane Hart wrote about ‘How to Create a Social Learning Environment’ in the November 09 issue of Inside Learning Technologies. She covered the major tools that can be used to create a Social Learning Environment for free or at a low cost.

With our focus on mobile learning, we’re constantly attempting to address the multifarious platforms in the mobile technology space.
These days, phones are sophisticated, and some come with operating systems that allow for installation and removal of applications on the device. While this is a common and accepted paradigm on computers, its still relatively novel for mobile devices. Mobile devices in the past came with fixed features that couldn’t be altered, and a user had to make do with the functionality that shipped with the device.

That the LMS needs to incorporate social learning elements is no longer a point of debate but both a question of survival for the LMS itself and also a test of how the LMS handles the balance of both the elements of training and the ‘networkedness’ of the social learning.  We’ve been hearing of experts commenting that LMSs today don’t come with appropriate social media technology built in.

We’d like to differ; the UpsideLMS comes with a unique social learning framework that lets users actually access such social tools from within the LMS in a robust and secure environment for connecting to and sharing with fellow users. Letting users move beyond routine training, into actual personal development.

As social technology growth continues to march on and dynamic learning grows to be the need of the day, it is little surprise that social media has now become an integral part of learning as well.

Various elearning development companies are integrating the popular social media services like Twitter, YouTube etc. right into their courses and LMS. A couple of months back, the Adobe Captivate blog demonstrated a twitter widget that can be integrated within a Captivate Flash output to send a tweet (as questions/suggestions/comments etc.) about the content of a learning module and get answers/opinions from others following the course tag. This is just one example. The options, however, are multifold.

Learning is fast turning Social, Informal, & Mobile.

That’s the message I’ve been hearing loud & clear from Learning Technologies 2010. While what’s being said in most of the sessions isn’t entirely new to us, it does reaffirm the direction in which things are going. The level of participation in these areas was clearly visible at the event which is a good sign. Adoption, after all, will happen only when L&D professionals start making some sense of it in first place.

Here are some highlights from the Day 1 sessions I attended:

A lot of companies today face a resource situation that’s not unique in this age. A few key individuals holding important technical and project management knowledge is quite common.

Jane Hart released the final list of top 100 tools for learning 2009 last month. It’s been created based on responses from 278 learning professionals worldwide and has taken several months to compile.