How do we define early adopters?

Are they companies and individuals who set out and say, “we are going to follow but add value”, or “we see what is possible and move forward”?

I say no.

Early adopters understand the power and benefits that come with the technology or solution. In the case of social learning, they realized the capabilities, foresaw the challenges, identified the features to bring about a new experience for their learners.

In turn, their learners responded. They gained insight, added value, engaged and inspired others, and brought a real sense of collaborative and community learning.

Social Learning is about adding social media types to e-learning.  It is taking that next step, to see what is possible, to try out new ideas for higher engagement boosting comprehension, retention and more importantly, synthesis.  Adult learners want to see real gains and a real world experience in their learning.

Social Learning enables that and more.

Can you add APIs (Application Program Interfaces) and Mashups to go beyond what is possible and explore new learning opportunities, regardless of the location?  Yes.  Can you enable your learners to create, edit and share in real time documents; offer new ideas and develop a sense of belonging through various new forms of social media?  Yes, to all the above.

That is the amazing strength of social learning, but it doesn’t stop there.

Virtual Worlds can be integrated with various social media offerings, and the next evolution of social learning incorporates augmented reality, mobile learning with tablets and the use of livecasting.

Will this make you an early adopter? Absolutely.  Will it offer an engagement and experience for your learners and equally as important, boost their productivity? Yes.

At this year’s Global Leadership Congress, Hitachi Data Systems, Mercer, Plastipak and General Mills will discuss the details on how they implemented and acheived success with social learning.

As an attendee, you too will experience social learning, first hand. Brainstorming, collaboration and engagement is included, all components of social learning.

A learning tool designed to help you identify the appropriate social learning types to meet your company’s business needs and eliminate the challenges is included.

So, who are the early adopters?

You are.

The Global Leadership Congress, Social Learning Roundtable will be May 11th, from 2-5 p.m.

If you haven’t yet registered for the Global Leadership Congress, seats are still available, although they are going fast. To learn more about the Global Leadership Congress, May 9-11th in Philadelphia, visit the event page.

How do we define social learning?

Is it a collaborative approach? Enhanced feature sets to engage learners? Strategy tied to learning initiatives from a business standpoint?

Or is it a way to ensure that our employees and our customers see the value of  learning and its benefits?

Benefits of Social Learning

• Gives power and provides engagement to your learners, they seek this out
• Eliminates passive training, now you can find out what your employees are thinking, responding and inquiring about
• Opens up an experience that can show the real impact of learning
• Does away with instructor led training that is often non-engaging, lacks interactivity and hopes that everyone asks questions and is involved (rarely the case)
• Enables people regardless of location, division, department to be part of something rather than nothing
• Offers opportunities to link to job roles, skills, leadership development using tools not available before

Two types of Social Learning & Benefits

Social Q/A

• End users ask questions, Subject matter experts respond, end users add comments
• Unique Value Proposition- establish mentoring program, one learner to one SME (via department, division, region, etc.)

Gain?

• Eliminates on the job training – which has been shown ineffective in the long term
• Identifies topics that could be used for future training

Scribd & Slideshare

• Employees or Trainers can upload presentations and share them with other learners
• Training department or employees can create, upload, read, print or share documents, audio/video files, presentations, spreadsheets, etc.

Unique Value Proposition

• Training Departments can provide quick reference materials, cards, video clips or presentations, audio, etc. to employees/customers and identify how many times they have been viewed, printed & shared – reduces cost to department for unnecessary future training or courses, reduces cost to department (eliminates printing/shipping), opens up global experience – which can be tied to native language (for example you have employees outside your home country)

Gain

• Localized learning
• Higher engagement
• Eliminates waste
• Identifies topics to train & topics to re-train (via blended learning or e-learning)

Bottom Line

Social Learning offers your learners, new opportunities, provides you as a training executive with future topics without the need of constant gap analysis, reduces costs in the short term and long term and identifies what your trainees need and want.

To gain a new perspective on social learning, please make sure to attend the exclusive event of the year, the Global Leadership Congress, May 9-11, 2011 in Philadelphia.  A roundtable on this topic and its strategy from a training and department angle will be presented. To learn more about the roundtable including the agenda, click Social Learning at GLC.

In our Social Learning Executive Council, we’ve spent the past 18 months studying how organizations are applying social media technologies to improve learning.  From our observations, one thing is clear: online learning via talking books with interactive video and conferencing with peers, experts and authors is going to happen…and it’s going to happen on an iPad or one of the other 30+ tablets we are now tracking (see The Tablet Tidal Wave).

2011 CorpU Social Learning Executive Council

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“Don’t let it come crashing down on you”

Defying all expectations, Apple’s iPad is selling over 1 million units monthly since inception.  The rise of eBooks is unstoppable.  Sure, you can be a naysayer; I was.  I like my print newspaper and my hardback books, thank you very much.

But it’s time to wake up to the fact that print book sales are declining:

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Within the last two weeks, I’ve had 3 interesting experiences related to immersive learning simulations. While Second Life was all the rage about 2 years ago, it’s rare to hear people talking about it much these days. However, three people have convinced me that simulations and immersive learning experiences continue to gain traction as increasingly more valuable and more effective methods for driving performance improvement.

First, I met Jessica Trybus, Founder & CEO of Etcetera Edutainment. Jessica studied under Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University professor who died from cancer and famously recorded his Last Lecture. I had not known that Randy’s focus as a computer science professor was on human-computer interaction.

Safety Training in 3D

One feature of Randy’s work at CMU was synthetic interview technology that allows people to interact with video. One example I’m familiar with is a 3D video replica of Abraham Lincoln at the Civil War museum in Harrisburg, PA. Visitors can really feel as though they’re talking with Honest Abe himself as the technology is programmed to answer more than 200 questions.

When Jessica met Randy after having worked at Disney’s Pixar, she was amazed by CMU’s new technologies and enrolled in a Master’s Degree program there. Upon graduation, she founded Etcetera Edutainment to build immersive learning programs. She demonstrated her safety training programs for me to show how learners become aware of the dangers, including death, from missing a step in a procedure or forgetting to check equipment carefully.

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Ireland has been a home to eLearning for more than 30 years.   Perhaps the most well known early commercial successes of the Irish e-Learning industry was CBT Systems (later renamed SmartForce) which was founded in Dublin in 1984. SmartForce went on to become the leading CBT provider in the world in terms of revenue. The company began trading on NASDAQ in 1995 and by the time the company merged with Nashua, NH-based SkillSoft in 2002, it had annual revenues of over $200 million.  Since the 1980s, Ireland has seen the creation of dozens of e-Learning companies, many of whom are leaders in their respective areas of expertise and are pioneers of some of the most innovative solutions on the market. They range from specialized industry and solution oriented content providers to professional custom content and solution development services. Ireland claims its share of technology innovation in the learning arena with products such as WBT Systems‘ award-winning Learning Object-based solution and the innovative mentoring & evaluation technology for Microsoft .Net engineers developed by innerworkings.  Most recently, ThirdForce has continued the wave of learning industry consolidation driven out of Ireland with the successful integration of leading vendors from Ireland (Electric Paper), the United Kingdom (Creative Learning Media) and the United States (MindLeaders) to create Ireland’s latest e-Learning success.  Listen to the interview of Sharon Claffey-Kaliouby, Senior Vice President of Learning Solutions, Enterprise Ireland conducted by eLearning guru Elliott Masie as part of his Learning 2009 podcast series: http://www.learning2009.com/sponsor-podcasts/ila.htm

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With one week to go until the GLC, we are busily tending to last minute details, finalizing the program, printing (maybe in 2011 the whole program will be delivered on iPads?), packaging up the awards (unveiling March 1st evening at the Black Tie Gala), and getting ready to network and learn.  Needless to say, excitement and urgency fill the air.

You are hereby invited to attend The Social Learning Roundtable on Wednesday, March 3^rd, from 1-4pm, immediately following the Global Leadership Congress.  Our Social Learning Executive Council has been participating in research for the past 6 months and we will be presenting results, diving deeper into success stories, and discussing strategies and tools for enabling social & informal learning.

Social Learning is a complex topic, but one that has transformative potential.  Imagine a Facebook for Corporate Learning.  Imagine a private, secure professional network with easy access to experts, knowledge communities, best practice repositories, a Private-YouTube-for-You.  Imagine cohort communities, like a team of new leaders, working together collaboratively on action-learning projects across the globe, as part of a leadership development program.   Read more »