What+Will+Corporations+Do+in+the+next+3-5+Years?

Jane Hart: What corporations can do to **promote** social learning is:
 * Understand online social learning can’t be managed (L&D)
 * Support existing social learning; encourage others to use resources early adopters are using
 * Use the same tools that early adopters are using (IT)
 * Put training material on their intranet in easily accessible and searchable format for all employees to use as they need it
 * Add Google search capability on intranet and teach employees how to use it effectively and efficiently.
 * Help employees develop personal dashboards to give them easy access to resources they feel are important
 * Help teams develop their own supportive communities

Marc Rosenberg says: Learning strategies will change from push to pull, from courses to knowledge, from instructor-expertise to group-of-expertise, from events to just in time. Elearning opportunities:
 * Enrich the learning experience by making it more realistic, relevant, and authentic
 * Reach learners any time and anywhere
 * Enable lifelong learning
 * Scale up to reach increasingly larger audiences and enhance educaitonal opportunity
 * Enable the newest content to reach learners quickly, and update that content equally quickly
 * Enable consistent message delivery
 * Lower the cost of learning after initial investment
 * Reduce the strain on the existing physical plant
 * Build learner communities across time and distance
 * Serve the broader society

Create incentives to use elearning:
 * Build excellent learner support
 * Make elearning authentic, meaningful and valued
 * Meet student expectations for access, ease of use, structure, time management, engagement and support
 * Continue to provide access to instructors
 * Ensure online learning is accredited
 * Consider not giving students a choice
 * Help students to prefer elearning

New Paradigm: learning pulling information
 * Knowldege seeker
 * on demand learning

Elearning Opportunities:
 * Enrich the learning experience by making it more realistic, relevant, and authentic
 * Reach learners any time and anywhere
 * Enable lifelong learning
 * Scale up to reach increasingly larger audiences and enhance educational opportunity
 * Enable the newest content to reach learners quickly, and update that content equally quickly
 * Enable consistent message delivery
 * Lower the cost of learning after initial investment
 * Reduce the strain on the existing physical plant
 * Build learning communities across time and distance
 * Serve the broader society

I am not sure social media itself will matter to this as much as mobile devices. What learners access there-- whether via QR code support, Google and the like, or social media tools -- is what will matter.
 * Bozarth: ** 3.  3.) How do you envision social media aiding in performance support in the next three to five years?

I do think those who learn to leverage tools like Twitter, and who develop their own PLNs, will craft and employ their own, personally configured support activities, but I think individuals will do that for themselves more than the organization will do it for them. Also, we are now seeing a good deal of support coming from marketing rather than from 'training' areas. Again referencing the report I've attached, there is a shocking lack of interest in this among L&D practitioners.

3) How do you envision social media aiding in performance support in the next three to five years? What are the barriers to that future? What downfalls need to be avoided?
 * Willyerd **

Social technologies simply push the old EPSS (electronic performance support systems) to a whole new level, allowing for instant feedback and updating.

I think this is the first time in history that people are leaving behind the productivity tools they use to manage their lives personally outside work to enter a workplace that is a few years behind their personal lives.

Apps to me are the biggest opportunity space for performance support in the immediate term, and companies like GE have already opened up company-specific app stores. People spend over 2-1/2 hours a day on their phones, largely using apps. We should be leveraging that behavior to give them work productivity tools.

Of course I also must tout the idea behind the company I recently sold to SuccessFactors. Jambok (now Jam at SuccessFactors) made it possible for people to author, distribute, and find any type of object, including video. With one click from your browser, you can capture your screen and narrate a PowerPoint, explain a new system, or demonstrate a spreadsheet. (Think Camtasia for dummies.) Or turn on your webcam and with one click, post to the (private) cloud.

This ability to make every person in the company able to share content allows performance support for the most obscure tasks that only 3 people in the company care about, and a learning function could never justify expending resources to work on the topic.

 Social technologies make it possible to have content readily available on any topic, voted on by the crowd to help with determining what is credible.

Of course there's lots of downfalls with any new technology, but I've been around long enough to think the rhetoric sounds the same as when email was introduced and when the internet was made accessible by the web. Same song, third verse.

 The biggest downfall, I think, is when companies take the stance that they are in control of the conversation.

Learning a new reality of offering guidelines and instilling responsibility when anyone has the power to talk to anyone is the new challenge. I love this quote (in Forbes last month) from Marc Benioff, CEO, <span style="color: #0040a1; font-family: 'Helvetica','sans-serif';">[|Salesforce.com] <span style="font-family: 'Helvetica','sans-serif';">: <span style="font-family: 'Helvetica','sans-serif';">“The elites—or managers in companies—no longer control the conversation. This is how insurrections start. This isn’t just about Arab spring. This is about corporate spring.”

The term was previously used beginning in March 2005 by numerous media commentators to suggest that a spin-off benefit of the [|invasion of Iraq] would be the flowering of Western-friendly Middle East democracies.
 * Arab Spring ** refers to the democratic uprisings that arose independently and spread across the Arab world in 2011. The movement originated in Tunisia in December 2010 and quickly took hold in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.