Following on from my previous post where I discussed the need for spelling out the use of social media for learning, I have now started to pull together a new resource, which looks at how social media can be used for different types of learning.
Rather than use the broad categories of formal and informal learning - terms which I think are pretty difficult to grasp, and which are being confused and abused if phrases I have read like "managing informal learning information" are anything to go by! - I have decided to categorise the use of social media in the following 5 different ways:
- IOL - Intra-Organisational Learning - how social media
tools can be used to keep employees up to date and up
to speed on strategic and other internal initiatives - FSL - Formal Structured Learning - how educators
(teachers, trainers, learning designers) as well as students can use social media within education and training - for courses, classes, workshops etc - GDL - Group Directed Learning - how groups of individuals
- teams, projects, study groups etc - can use social media to work
and learn together (a "group" could just be two people, so coaching
and mentoring falls into this category) - PDL - Personal Directed Learning - how individuals can
use social media for their own (self-directed) personal or
professional learning - ASL - Accidental & Serendipitous Learning - how
individuals, by using social media, can learn without consciously
realising it (aka incidental or random learning)
It may well be that these categories will need tweaking or even overhauling completely, but here is my first attempt at how social media can be used in these 5 categories, which will be a work in progress.
Using social media for different types of learning
The next step of course will be to decide which types of learning you or your organisation wants to support/enable - and how (by which I mean, which specif tools should you employ).
UPDATE: See Harold Jarche's posting Social Media and Self-Directed Learning which includes a diagram of how to explain these 5 categories to clients.
