I have heard a recurring pattern to these questions, and I would like to share them here. Call it the first draft of an FAQ, if you will.

Q: My organization needs to ensure its messaging follows compliance regulations, and our legal department tends to be very strict on what we produce. Can we still use social learning?

Yes. However, before you launch a pilot, you will definitely want to have a conversation with your legal department to ensure that you create a set of procedures which meet their requirements.

Q: Do we have to completely cede control to our learners?

For some reason, people who are new to social learning envision a “wild west” situation. However, user-generated learning shouldn’t resemble the mash-up of content on a band’s Myspace page. That’s why I’ve proposed a model of smart learning where the organization partners to produce bi-directional communication and learning.

Q: Will formal structured learning go away?

Not for a very long time. We’ll still rely on classroom training to implement certain soft-skills as well as certain hands-on skills. Social learning serves as an ideal supplement to these ideas. Therefore, learners hear about concepts in class and receive reinforcement from a community after class.

Q: My IT Department has concerns about using open-source software or software that makes calls outside of the corporate firewall.

Some social learning solutions are purely open-source projects that have been built around plug-ins. For example, WordPress Multi-User and BuddyPress offer highly versatile solutions. However, plenty of LMS vendors have also entered the game and added social learning technologies to their product. Your choice now depends on your business strategy and your budget.

Q: This technology seems to be evolving quickly. If we buy a system from a vendor, will it be outdated in just a few years?

We’ve seen a lot of ideas towards a social learning management system, but no vendor has created the “killer app” yet. Honestly, vendors are still protoyping in an emerging market. So, embracing a software-as-a-service strategy (SaaS) may be a savvy approach.

Q: Where do we start?

The best place to start a social-learning pilot is often with a core group of users who have common learning needs, but they are highly geographically distributed. I have seen pilots work exceptionally well with salespeople as well as end-users of software within the organization. Start small and manageable with your pilot, and then let the concept evolve from there.

Q: Where can I see a model of bi-directional collaboration within learning?

In March 2010, I published an article entitled Smart Learning for Smart Grids in Powergrid International magazine. In addition to looking at next generation learning technologies, you’ll find models for SMART learning in figures 2 and 3. Together, these models indicate that learning and development departments will have to rethink how they serve their organizations.

The work within Valve Software has produced pioneering titles such as the Half-Life series, CounterStrike, Portal, Team Fortress, and the Left 4 Dead franchise.

From a business perspective, Newell understands how to create an environment where highly creative people expect that they will be doing cutting-edge work each day, and he offers some management insights.

However, I want to point out some pieces in his presentation which reflect a sea-change within the way that business works. Starting at 3:15, Newell describes how digital rights management (DRM) has essentially created a wall between game developers and consumers — where consumers have essentially been forced to experience games within walled gardens designed by the game’s developer and publisher.

Instead, Newell discusses the ecosystem of collaboration between Valve and its fan community (starting at 6:30). Fans produce custom mods and maps for many of Valve’s titles, and they’re allowed to share these modifications with the community. In fact, games such as CounterStrike have remained popular years after release because the community remains engaged in the development process.

In the digital age, bi-directional collaboration has found a place within the world of marketing and even product development. Fans/customers provide real-time feedback (and often participation) with the manufacturer or service provider. However, the world of learning and development has lagged behind in this trend. Organizations still push content out from their central core to learners.

In the traditional model of training, learners are consumers of content. They get spoon-fed learning within walled gardens of classrooms and e-learning modules. Learners then have little opportunity to contribute or collaborate. However, that model has become antiquated through so many collaborative technologies that now exist. Instead of forcing learners into a passive role, organizations must re-envision the process of learning within the organization. The members of the workforce must become active collaborators in the production of learning.

If I were teaching an entry level instructional design class, I might ask students to differentiate between Valve Software’s view of “customers as collaborators” with Ubisoft’s seeming approach that all customers are potential software pirates. Ubisoft’s approach has generated an uprising (including frustrated individuals launching DDOS attacks).

Quite simply, do you serve your customers’ needs or do you try to force them through unpopular and potentially ineffective processes to suit your own needs?

Even in the world of learning and development, we must align our solutions with our learners’ needs. More importantly, we must respect that they likely know much more about those needs than we do. We must invite them to collaborate with us to find effective solutions.

As a result, I’ve been having a number of excellent conversations with people who have been thinking about the future of learning and development.

• The traditional design methodologies of ADDIE and ISD need re-envisioning in the post-Facebook age.
• The tempo needed for learning and development departments has accelerated.
• The mindsets and skills needed within training departments need to be reconstituted.

In short, organizations need to rethink the relationship and network structures within their organization.

The article itself provides a nice framing platform for some of these conversations, and I’ll be diving more deeply into these topics over the next few weeks.

According Sachin Sarin and Reuven Dukas at McMaster University, inexperienced female fruit flies follow the lead of mated female fruit flies when selecting which fruit to lay their eggs.

Focal females (observers) that experienced novel food together with mated females (models), who had laid eggs on that food, subsequently exhibited a stronger preference for laying eggs on that food over another novel food compared with focal females that experienced the food alone.

As humans, we are constantly picking up cues from the people who surround us. Their behavioral choices influence our own choices, as demonstrated by the research work of Christakis and Fowler which shows that smoking cessation and obesity are directly influenced by your social network.

Christakis and Fowler present research that loneliness spreads through social networks. While this idea seems completely counter-intuitive, it’s a powerful insight. If you are lonely, you exhibit negative behaviors to the people within your network. In fact, having a friend who reports being lonely makes a person 52 percent more likely to feel lonely themselves. Drake Bennett of the Boston Globe presents a great summary of this research.

Loneliness, by contrast, seems to spread through an accumulation of encounters. Lonely people are, in general, less pleasant than nonlonely people: more impatient, more moody, more self-pitying. They have, in the language of psychology, “more negative affect,” and each unpleasant encounter they subject their friends to wears on those friends and taxes the friendship, until the friends themselves start to feel lonely, as well. Having more than one lonely friend only accelerates the process.

Female fruit flies take their cues from each other. Social learning allows females to determine where to lay their eggs. However, humans take their cues from each other too. Positive behaviors (and perhaps learned helplessness) radiate through social networks.

If you want to drive learning through your organization, then you must also understand your organization’s social network and the embedded social capital.

The wireless manufacturer was growing rapidly. As a result, they were hiring software and hardware engineers at an incredible pace. The organization’s formal learning programs could hardly keep up with the rapid development of technology. New engineers typically had two questions:

• Who within the organization was the expert on topic X or Y?
• What information do these experts know which might answer my question?

In the old days, these questions would be answered by a formal Knowledge Management system and application. This top-down approach was tried in the 1990s, but it often failed spectacularly because few people invested the time necessary to actually create resource information. In many cases the Knowledge Management system sat empty because people saw it as a detriment to getting “actual work” done. There was an organizational misalignment between the goals of the organization and the goals of the individual.

Now, let’s return to the example of the telecommunications company. Engineers, working in different parts of the company, recognized learning gaps within the organization. They didn’t look for an executive champion to launch a Knowledge Management system. Instead, these engineers went open-source and created wikis around the knowledge gaps.

Wiki pages are simple to set-up and create content (as evidenced by wikipedia). Soon, wiki pages were appearing in various departments throughout the entire organization. These wiki pages represented a bottom-up social learning solution designed by engineers for their peers.

However, these wiki pages also presented a number of challenges:

• Dispersed: There was no central repository for these wiki pages. They were hosted in different areas, so you had to know about them to find them.
• Standards and Structure: varied from department to department.
• Alignment: There may be gaps between the wiki’s content and the organization’s goals.
• Validation: The content on the wiki page may not have been vetted by organization’s top subject-matter expert in the area.

When Corinne learned about these projects, she encouraged them to come within a common platform and framework. The wiki solution needed to be able to scale to a much larger scale. As a result, people needed to take responsibility for making key decisions about the wiki’s organizations and structure. The bottom-up process evolved into a managed process that still retained many of its peer-to-peer characteristics. However, rules-making and process also slows down the development of social learning content.

Based on her experience, Corrine shares the following wisdom: “Social learning is unavoidable and enables agile knowledge transfer within organizations. But to be most effective, all levels of management must promote, enable and sustain the social learning systems.”

Sometimes an organization needs a top-down social learning solution; however, grassroots social learning solutions will naturally fill gaps when authorized solutions cannot  be (or have not been) developed. A savvy social learning strategy allows for four different models:

• Rollout of authorized top-down solutions (mentor programs, centralized social learning tools)
• Creation of grassroots social learning solutions (vibrant ecosystem)
• Roadmap to transition grassroots social learning solutions into managed processes with structure and accountability
• Roadmap to transition top-down social learning solutions into community-managed projects with distributed structure and accountability

No single solution will match every organizational need. Therefore, learning managers must manage all four social learning processes.

These training programs often form the backbone of an organization. Some of them are developed internally while others are purchased off-the-shelf.

Yet, good instructional design takes time to design, develop, and test. The ADDIE model of instructional design, which has been an industry standard for years, shows strain when it’s applied to concepts of social learning.

We can no longer think of learning events as single classroom or e-learning events. We have to ask questions about how the learning program integrates into the organization’s social learning culture.

These questions challenge fundamental assumptions in the traditional instructional design process. Organizations have to cede some control to their learners to direct the creation of the learning experience.

In the next few posts, I will share examples of how social learning either accelerates (or conflicts) with traditional learning practices.