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= Intro: Social Media as Performance Support =



When you mention eLearning, what comes to mind?

To many people it is something, someone, somewhere created on some kind of scarey [|hibby-jibby] software to be viewed on the web or via a DVD. The learning part is very individual, can even be done at three am if need be, and, very, very, alone.

Does eLearning need to be the Siberia of learning?

Can it be social? Can eLearning do more than teach... can it really support performance? This wiki is designed to explore these questions within corporations. But before we begin, what is [|eLearning]? What does it entail?

//What is eLearning?//
eLearning comprises all forms of electronically supported learning and teaching; it can be outside of the classroom or support an in-class education via technology.

It includes:
 * Podcasting
 * Intranets
 * Blogging
 * Video-on-Demand
 * Slide Sharing and Photo Sharing
 * Social Bookmarking
 * Wikis
 * Virtual Worlds
 * Social Networks (incl. Twitter)
 * Personal Learning Environments

//What is Social Learning?//
People learn through interacting with each other. Social learning – like all learning – changes them as individuals, but it also has the potential to change the broader groups in which they participate.media type="youtube" key="6a_KF7TYKVc" height="220" width="292" align="right"

[|Social learning] can be part of a planned group activity in a formal training environment. It can also be as informal as one worker asking another worker a question at the water cooler, looking for solutions about a problem they are having back at their desk.

[|Social learning] does not have to be face-to-face, it can be done using technology - facebook, twitter, blogs, or, like our media here, [|a wiki].

Social learning is a collaboration inside a virtual town hall, meeting up with your social network via social media.

= What is Social Media as Performance Support? =

//**Social Learning + Social Media = Performance Support**//
Albert Bandura is known as the originator of Social Learning theory. The theory suggests that a combination of environmental/social and psychological factors influence behavior

There are four requirements for learning and modeling behavior:
 * 1) **Attention** — various factors increase or decrease the amount of attention paid.
 * 2) **Retention** — remembering what you paid attention to.
 * 3) **Reproduction** — reproducing the image.
 * 4) **Motivation** — having a good reason to imitate.

The introduction of web-based and mobile technologies to transform communication into a dialogue that is interactive has huge implications on changing behavior or [|performance support].

These technologies are commonly referred to as [|**Social Media**]. A learning organization would be remiss to not consider the advantages that social media can provide to performance support. media type="youtube" key="U1pY4FgBj_8" height="162" width="277" align="center"

= What Are Corporations Doing Now? =

//** The "here and now" of social media-who is in control? **//

**Jane Hart**
Social learning can take place in both formal and informal workplace settings. Jane breaks informal learning into two realms: non-formal and informal. 80% of workplace learning is informal or non-formal and this is where most of social learning occurs. **Formal** -L&D online workshops where //everyone contributes// to learning (L&D in control/learning is intentional and aware) **Non-Formal** - Mentors, Networking where learners go //seeking// knowledge (learner in control, learning is intentional and aware) **Informal** - Online conversations and meetings where learning may occur //serendipitously//, or not (learning in control, learning is unintentional and unaware)

Jane’s blog // > @http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/ // The chart below shows the percentage of workers using social media to get their jobs done, by age group.



**Marc Rosenberg **
Marc suggests that mobility and decentralization will help transform learning in organizations. Informal learning will begin to play a more crucial role in performance support at work. Learning strategies will shift:

**E-learning to E-working**- Learning will be a function of work and not necessarily a mutually exclusive event **Push to pull**- The learner will be in control of pulling tailored learning as needed as opposed to organization pushing general training. **Authoring to blogging**- Experts are everywhere, not just the Instructor

Marc’s website: @http://marcrosenberg.com/

**Karie Willyerd**
Karie points out, in a personal email, that there is an overwhelming amount of information readily available to an individual today. // "... // // Millennials have faced this in school, with an overwhelming amount of information readily available to them. //

// As a result, you see them forming tribes, or guilds, to help each other make sense of all the information and cull collectively. As they come into the workplace, they are bringing those same habits, and expect to be able to poll their tribe or guild to find the information they need. The most efficient way to do that, in their experience, is through social networking or social [|collaboration platforms]." //

Karie's twitter web page: http://twitter.com/#!/angler

For example, Best Buy recently decided to utilize crowdsourcing to complete store forecasts. Accuracy was greatly improved when everyone participated. As opposed to specific individuals tasked with collecting information, tasks were spread out to a whole crowd or community. Social technologies get taken to a whole new level with the abundance of information available and we will be ever increasingly reliant on crowd sourcing for performance improvement.

In a recent email exchange, Karie was asked whether mentoring will go tech via social mentoring, she responded with: // “Mentoring already has gone social for many companies. In our survey we did for our book, Millennials cited mentoring & coaching as their most preferred way to learn, whereas every other generation selected classroom as number 1. With 70 million Baby Boomers expected to exit the workplace in the next 19 years, and only 50 million Gen Xers behind them, I anticipate we'll look for ways to mentor on a mass scale, and thus social mentoring will become far more prevalent.” //

**Jane Bozarth**
Jane was asked via email: “What emerging social media technology do you like?” // “I think the most promising technology of the future, particularly for the learning implications, is Facebook's Open Graph. I can watch a video on workplace safety... and Sam can see that I'm watching it and come watch it with me... and Sue can join in and talk about her interest in developing safety checklists based on her recent reading of Gawande's Checklist Manifesto... and we can go visit the site's web page, or follow Gawande on Twitter, or access the many videos of him talking about this...and have a conversation about what 'our' checklist might look like, and vet that with our own communities. It truly supports meaningful social learning, and the potential is just breathtaking. THIS is what the LMS should do, instead of just counting transactions and storing them in a database.” //

Jane 's blog: @http://bozarthzone.blogspot.com/

=What will Corporations do in the next 3-5 Years?=

// Meet George Jetson and his boy Elroy! //
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Information is doubling every two years.

And that is today. Only five years ago, it took five years for it to double In three to five years, it’s anybody's guess.

Within the next three to five years, how will social media support performance?

// Leverage Existing Behavior //
Willyerd, in the [|Harvard Business Review], states:

// "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." //

In a personal email, she was asked about her vision for social media aiding performance support in the next three to five years.

Willyerd responded:

// "[|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... //

// 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 introducedand when the internet was made accessible by the web. Same song, third verse.” //

//** Create the Tribe...then Support It **//


Until the advent of 2.0, the internet was impersonal, random and almost too big to navigate.

Social Media transformed the internet from an unfamiliar, socially disorganized behemoth to a humanly manageable series of social circles, or [|tribes]. These tribes are formed digitally, based on shared interests, goals, desires, etc.

While Hart and Rosenberg believe in the future of intranet search engines, reaching learners anytime, anywhere:media type="youtube" key="uQGYr9bnktw" height="161" width="283" align="right"

// “…Put training material on their intranet, in easily accessible and searchable format for all employees to use as they need it…” // Hart

They also believe in developing supportive communities or tribes. As Marc Rosenberg stated in his web site, companies need to //“…Build learner communities across time and distance…serve the broader society…”//

Mark Rosenberg also emphasized the importance of the message:
 * 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

He is seeing a new paradigm with the learner //pulling// information instead of trainers //pushing// it. Learners are knowledge seekers looking for on-demand learning.

The tribe will help promote and maintain knowledge.

//** A Twist **//
It may not even be about the media, it’s how users access it.

Dr. Bozarth, in a personal email, states: // “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. //

// 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....There is a shocking lack of interest in this among L&D practitioners.” //

//** The Revolution **//
Is there really a revolution brewing around [|social media] ?

Employee unrest or employee insight? Corporate spring or business benefit?

In a personal email, Dr. Willyerd quoted the CEO of [|SalesForce], Marc Benioff:

// “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. //

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// I love this quote (in [|Forbes last month]) from Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com : //

// '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] .'” //

//** What Does all this Mean? **//
Change is coming. Embrace it or lose your edge.


 * **Pervasive:** In social media, the change may be so all encompassing and completely integrated into our lives, that we won't even think "...Hmmm, what //form of social media// do I want to use...", it may be, "...on what //platform// will I get this conversation going ?"


 * **Technology:** Companies will, once again, be at the [|forefront of technology] as they once were. They need to be, otherwise, they will have difficulty recruiting and keeping a workforce.


 * **Same Business Rules:** The future of successful implementation is based on business rules in use today. The concepts will be the same, we will just use them differently.


 * **Tribes:** Companies will now create and foster tribes. Performance and performance support, along with [|social mentoring], will be sustained within the tribes.

= Barriers and Boosts =

// Success Story - Be a Yahoo! //
Yahoo! recently implemented an online Customer Retention Management system, Salesforce.com, for over 3,500 employees to use to keep track of leads, manage their sales and their day to day work, including collaborating and learning. They are several years ahead of their competition on this, and their results are impressive. We interviewed Mike Bellissimo, the head of the Growth, Enrichment, and Training Department, and his team, Laura Mishima, and Laura Moraros on November 14, 2001; they credited their success to: > Management support > Corporate culture of sharing > Performance Support portion is easy to use and contribute to > Initial users are power users who require the information on the platform to succeed in their jobs > User's first visit was positive and their old tools are no longer available so they return to the site
 * **Executive Buy-in**:
 * **User Enthusiasm:**

These characteristics were the basis of success for forward-thinking Yahoo!. However, even with their best efforts, it took close to two years to go from an idea to implementation.

Bellissimo and his team persevered through push back and politics. He recommends picking an //un-arguable project// -- something that so obviously needed to be improved upon that no one could argue against it. (Michael Bellissimo, Global Sales Readiness: Enabling a culture of continuous learning lecture, September 2011, San Diego State University, Educational Technology Department)

In many organizations, //lack of// executive buy-in and user enthusiasm are barriers to successfully implementing social media. The next sections examine these barriers and boosts over them for the near future.

// Barriers //
According to Jane Bozarth, Ed.D. (personal communication, November 6, 2011), // management needs to support social learning // in the workplace for it to really take off in an organization. <span style="color: #008000; display: block; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.6667px; text-align: left;">"In almost every case, management philosophy (not a particular person, necessarily) is behind successful sweeping use. **It's the difference, essentially, between the principal who sees cell phones as the biggest classroom disruption ever, and the one who sees them as classroom computers that the parents are paying for**…Senior leadership can choose to allow itself to be held hostage by its own IT department. Organizations that want this can do it.” Companies that use Web 2.0 technologies, such as social learning, are achieving very promising results.  In a McKinsey survey done in December 2010 of 3,249 executives shows that two-thirds of the respondents use Web 2.0 in their organizations. Seventy seven percent of companies that use these technologies were able to access knowledge faster -- on average, 30% faster. The table shows more key findings: Jane Hart blogs that //corporate policies// are one of the reasons social media hasn’t taken off. Many corporations forbid use of social media tools at work, even using hardware or software that the employee brings in. Often, privacy and security issues are cited as reasons.
 * < ** Benefit ** ||< **% Companies Reporting** ||< **% Average Improvement** ||
 * Increasing speed of access to knowledge ||= 77 || 30 ||
 * Increasing number of successful innovations for new products/services || 28 || 20 ||
 * Reducing time to market for products/services || 28 || 20 ||
 * Increasing revenue || 18 || 15 ||

// Boosts //
Karie Willyerd (Vice President, Learning & Social Adoption at SuccessFactors) has ideas for overcoming these barriers (personal communication, November 3, 2011): “//**We need to turn fear of the unknown into excitement about opportunities**…This is where the rhetoric is exactly the same as when email and the internet came into play.//
 * // First, you must have a good [|social media policy]. //
 * // See [|socialmediagovernance.com], and the access to over 170 policies from different kinds of companies. //
 * // Secondly, offer education on how to be a good digital citizen, like [|Intuit]does. //
 * // Third, provide private social tools for use within a secure environment. //
 * **Finally, get over it!** // (Emphasis ours.) If someone wants to take something outside a company, they can and will. Zip drives are far more dangerous than an internal social network, which is far more transparent.” //

To overcome these barriers, deal with the real issues of security and privacy. How? Here are some ideas from Jane Hart:
 * Keep resources behind corporate firewall or use a public site's private service
 * Create social networking resources behind organization's firewall
 * Share advice on privacy settings and confidentiality with employees

Training and Development Department policies are also often a barrier to using social media for performance support. In many organizations, Training and Development is responsible for the training material’s accuracy and professional look. In addition, Training and Development must track all employee learning. When performance is supported through social media, the Training and Development department may feel left out and not in control of the message. These [|policies] need to be re-examined in light of the following facts and realities:
 * 1) Collaboratively created content is accurate. At least one study showed that Wikipedia's content was at least as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica's.
 * 2) Training materials do not need to look professional to be effective. To be effective, training material needs to be easily available, useable, and useful by being accessible on the company's intranet, easily searchable with Google-like search capabilities, available on and built for hand-held devices, and have the content that employees are looking for.
 * 3) Training and Development does not need to track all empoyee training. The important thing is that employees are able to effectively, efficiently, and legally do their jobs.
 * 4) Training and Development should shift to helping individuals get the training and/or support that they say they nee to do their jobs. They need to act as performance consultants for individuals rather than training providers for groups.

//Barriers//
Currently, many workers do not choose social media when they need performance support. In fact, when Jane Bozarth analyzed survey responses to a recent [|eLearning Guild] survey, she found that almost 30% of survey respondents did not plan to use social media for performance support. Yet performance support is an excellent fit for social media; performance support is for finding information that can be referenced, not memorized, and social media is about exchanging information. In the near future, [|Charles Jennings] ,Performance Consultant, blogs that using social media for performance support the way we use GPS for directions: getting immediate instructions for narrowly defined tasks.

// Boosts //
Jane Hart’s advice to organizations interested in capitalizing on social media in the near future is to actively support employees that are using social media, get out in front of employees who aren’t yet so their way is clear to use social media. Most importantly, be careful to stay out of the way of both groups progress. To actively support employees already using social media, build on what they are doing by:
 * Changing corporate policies to allow the use of the tools those employees are using
 * Buying the tools for them
 * Having IT support their tools

Karie Willyerd reiterates this in stronger terms in personal emails: // “Organizations would be well advised to put in place their own social technologies if they want to know what the conversation is about, because it will happen with or without them. See the discussions on places like [|OpenDoor.com].” // To encourage employees who are not yet using social media, Jane Hart suggests these ideas:
 * Help them find useful, trustworthy resources including social communities
 * Help teams set up online support communities within the organization (this helps with privacy/security issues too). Remember to start with the individual's need, not a top down approach.
 * Help individuals develop information filters (Personal Knowledge Management) to classify and organize information (ex. aggregate blog feed), encourage them to gather information and share it with their teams.

Marc Rosenberg’s web site emphasizes that companies need systems to manage social learning mediums. Mike Bellissimo agrees: Yahoo!’s platform replaces many different tools (including most emails, a variety of web sites, tools, and systems) that users had been using with one system. However, Jane Bozarth warns that the systems shouldn’t encourage over-managing social media (which tends to kill grass roots initiatives). Another pitfall: expecting everyone to use it, every time. People fulfill their need for support differently. Social media is another tool, not the only tool.

Beyond Today’s Barriers
In the next 3-5 years, organizations who successfully capitalize on Web 2.0 will overcome the barriers, real and otherwise, that management and users bring to social learning. For these organizations, performance support through social networks will be as ubiquitous as emails are now. Other organization will still be mired in privacy, security, and sharing issues, to their detriment. For Yahoo! and other forward-acting organizations, where are the future pitfalls? >
 * Keeping people engaged and the content up to date
 * Yahoo!'s solution: Users and contributors understand that content will be updated at least every six months or it will be removed. Yahoo! is creating a full time position with this responsibility.
 * Improving the platform based on user feedback
 * Yahoo!'s solution: The Growth, Enrichment, and Training Department is gathering metrics on adoption rates and satisfaction feedback to draw from for future platform improvements.

As the rest of the industry catches up, they will face these hurdles as well.