Real Workplace LearningExploring informal and social learning

Yesterday we held our third#realwplearn chat.  The Topic was on Social without workflow is doomed.  The pre-reading was provided here.

During the live chat session we asked 4 questions:

1. How has SoMe helped you solve a problem?
2. What social media tools work well in the workflow?
3. How do we ensure that new social tools don’t create a new silo?
4. How do we avoid the “Field of Dreams” approach?

I’ve captured the last 500 tweets in  this Tweetdoc.  (Note: it starts just after Q1 has been tweeted).

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Join us on Wednesday, August 10 at 3 pm ET, 8 pm  BST for this month’s #RealWPLearn chat.  Topic:  Without workflow social is doomed

In preparation for this chat, take a look at the following article, which posits that ‘social’ must be positioned in workflow, not some add-on to our busy day.

Without workflow social business is doomedTweet

In the latest blog posting in my Smart Worker series, The Smart Worker : shares what s/he learns, I described two different projects that have been set up in organisations to support sharing of employee-generated content.  I reproduce them here:

1 – Dare2Share – sharing of podcasts and other resources

“Dare2Share allows BT employees to learn from each other by rapidly capturing and spreading learning throughout the organization in the form of podcasts, discussion threads, blogs, RSS feeds and other traditional knowledge assets (documents, courses and portals).” [BT Dares to share]

Here’s a video showing Peter Butler, from BT, talking about Dare2Share (hosted on their enterprise intranet platform, MS Sharepoint), and explaining that it would have been impossible for L&D to provide all the learning materials that BT Engineers needed unless they had taken this “sharing” approach to learning.

2 -Intelpedia – collaborative resource building

Intelpedia is a project set up by an Intel engineer Josh Bancroft in November 2005, when he decided that his co-workers should have quick and easy access to a raft of company information, from internal projects to historical background.   Intelpedia is hosted on the open source MediaWiki software.

When interviewed by SocialMedi.biz in 2009, and answering concerns about the use of a wiki in an organisation, Josh reported

“In the four-plus years that Intelpedia has been up and running, I have had exactly zero reported instances of an unwanted edit — of someone spamming or vandalizing or doing something inappropriate. …  I’ve heard the same from other companies, which should allay the fears that some corporate executives still harbor.”

Summary

Note, that in the case of Dare2Share, this was an initiative implemented by the L&D Department, but in the case of Intelpedia, it was one engineer who started it at the grass roots.  Projects like this are probably already underway in your organisation, initiated by individuals and teams who recognise the value of sharing for their teams.  But there may be other teams who could benefit from your help and support in getting something in place for their own needs.

What similar projects are running in your organisation?  How are you helping teams to share what they know/learn with one another?

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