Elearning blog: Learning re-imagined

Forrester Research Analyst Discusses Social Media and Social Networks

Organizations can leverage social media to foster discussions among learners. Groups can rate content similar to consumer websites, helping employees find targeted and relevant resources. Watch Claire Schooley, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research discuss trends around social media and social networks with respect to learning.

From capitalism to talentism: a complimentary webinar with Lucian Tarnowski

27 March 2013 – 12 p.m. GMT

Understanding the role of social media in talent engagement

As the prevalence of social networks continues to grow, more and more of us are using the likes of Twitter and Facebook for not just personal, but business use. Indeed, last Christmas Twitter revealed that it had more than 200 million monthly unique users; with both people and businesses keen to get involved and reap the benefits of this increasingly mainstream communication medium.

So with interest in social media at an all time high, does it have real relevance for businesses beyond representing a nice add-on?

Lucian Tarnowski, founder and CEO of BraveNewTalent.com, believes social media has created a fundamental shift in the way organisations communicate and engage with talent. He believes talent is king in the modern workplace and will explain how businesses can use social media to engage and foster talent, in a free Skillsoft webinar on Wednesday 27 March at 12pm GMT.

In the session, Lucian will explore:

• The effect and impact of social media on the talent function.
• How next generation talent now expects to be engaged online.
• The opportunity to leverage the internal knowledge and content at your organisation to the external world.
• Social learning trends and the future of online learning.

If you are interested in finding out more about how to use social media to attract and retain top talent, visit our event page to register for the free webinar. We look forward to seeing you (virtually at least!) on the day.

About Lucian Tarnowski
Lucian is Founder and CEO of BraveNewTalent.com the social platform where organisations create talent communities in order to attract, engage, develop people from their past, present and future workforce. The long term value is that BraveNewTalent will map the talent graph by knowledge, skills and potential enabling organisations to increase the efficiency of applying human capital. 

Lucian has been honoured as a Young Global Leader (YGL) by the World Economic Forum. He is also winner of the Global Enterprising Young Brit. In his spare time Lucian runs Take Heart India, a no overheads charity that provides blind and handicapped students in rural India with the vocational employment skills that guarantee them jobs for life. Lucian speaks to audiences around the world about the convergence of talent and technology and its impact on the future of the global workforce and education.

2012 Skillsoft Perspectives Canada: registration now open

By Melynda Hilliard

Here is a 2012 Skillsoft Perspectives Canada update from Melynda Hilliard, Skillsoft’s Events Marketing Manager. Stay tuned for more exciting details!

We are thrilled to announce that registration is now officially open for 2012 Skillsoft Perspectives Canada. Perspectives brings together our customers, employees, and other elearning industry experts for a unique opportunity to hear from distinguished speakers, discuss hot topics in the industry, and learn about our plans for the future. This year’s event will take place October 4 at the Old Mill Inn & Spa in Toronto.

At the event, Skillsoft customers will be able to network and learn from one another, reaping the benefits of a collaborative atmosphere that not only encourages participants to share experiences, strategies, and challenges, but also drives discussion around the connection between learning and business value. The theme of this year’s Perspectives Canada is “Driving Value Through Learning.”

Exploring Digital Immigrant Perceptions Toward Leadership Development

We’re pleased to bring you a guest post by Roderick Millar, Managing Editor at IEDP, the executive development information portal and of Developing Leaders magazine. Find more at www.IEDP.com.

By Roderick Millar, Managing Editor, IEDP

If you ask a leader whether they would like to engage with a learning program that fits around their schedule, does not involve travel, allows them to interact with peers and experts, gives them direct access to the latest thought leadership and is often less expensive than a traditional learning program, it is not surprising that they tend to agree that this would be a wonderful thing. When you make it clear that that is exactly what modern elearning programs can do, often their demeanour on the topic changes.

This is an area of curiosity that we are currently researching at IEDP.  From recent anecdotal discussions there seems to be a perception problem with the elearning medium which is quite at odds with current reality. Without wanting to prejudice our current research, it seems that the negative impressions from executives is partly a matter of outdated preconceptions and a concern about building ‘trust and empathy’ with other participants. Clearly the only way to change outdated attitudes is to provide newer information.  To do so, a stealthy approach needs to be adopted, where smaller groups can be introduced to modern versions of online learning and participate in blended approaches.

Save the Date! Perspectives 2012 is Around the Corner!

Melynda Hilliard is SkillSoft’s Events Marketing Manager. She will be sharing updates on Perspectives 2012 throughout the next few months. Stay tuned for more exciting details!

By Melynda Hilliard

Every year, hundreds of SkillSoft customers across business, government and education, attend SkillSoft’s Annual Perspectives User Conference to network and discuss the current issues in the e-learning industry. Today, we’re thrilled to release event information for our 2012 Perspectives event where attendees will have access to keynote speeches, numerous Learning Sessions and workshops on a wide variety of topics focusing on this year's theme of "Motivate, Innovate, Learn: Driving Value Through Learning." The annual conference will take place April 30 – May 3, 2012 in Orlando, Florida. To register for Perspectives 2012 visit: http://perspectives.skillsoft.com/2012/?srcid=blog. 

Perspectives is a yearly event that was created for SkillSoft customers to have an interactive forum to discuss innovations in the learning industry. It provides customers with a unique opportunity to share best practices with industry leaders and experts on how to create and maintain learning programs that deliver tangible results throughout organizations.

Enterprise 2.0 or Obsolescence: Your Choice

By Shawn Hunter

We had a fantastic interaction and presentation with Andy McAfee, author of Enterprise 2.0, this past week. He did a live, interactive satellite and webcast event to a global audience on the Leadership Development Channel, one of our leadership skills training services.  The interaction was fantastic – tons of great questions from afar – and lots of insights and questions via Twitter during the presentation. 

He opened by debunking a fairly straightforward idea that we hear constantly, “It’s not about the technology.” This is a common idea paraded about in organizations to demonstrate that while, yes, technology is of course changing, it is more about the business models, ideas, and market landscape that surrounds the changing technology.

Myself, I’ve been sucker to that same argument when talking about the importance of recognizing technology as a tacit enabler, but not the point itself.  McAfee wants to point out that now – more than ever before – the technology itself is changing at such a logarithmic rate, that indeed it has powerful impacts on the services and product innovation we provide.

Take at look at the graph Andy presented during the session.  When we weigh asset prices of industrial, transportation and infrastructure costs against the cost of available technology, clearly online technological costs are plummeting, and that has profound implications about how we can, and should, do business, as well as how we interact as communities in the emerging Enterprise 2.0 environment.  The price crash of collaborative technologies based on peripheral equipment like computers (iPads!, NetBooks!) has opened up immense opportunities for people to congregate virtually, share expertise, practices, and insights – and if they choose, to also collaborate in competitive ways in the market.

With the advent of online collaborative environments we are seeing heightened competition from everyone, everywhere, for everything. If you thought your market niche was product based, or particularly regional in scope, think again. With cool collaborative innovation sinks like InnoCentive, people can build iterative new products and services leveraging expertise around the world in a flash.

So as you and your business consider integrating Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, consider that the alternative could be obsolescence.

What's your organization's "Outward Facing" social media strategy?

By Jim Zimmermann

There are two main categories of enterprise social media - inward facing for interaction among employees, and outward facing for interacting with customers, business partners and the general public. Inward facing social media tools include SkillSoft’s inGenius, which facilitates social learning and collaboration. The concepts of inward facing social media have been discussed in several earlier posts in this blog.

Lately I’ve been seeing some interesting articles on unique ways enterprises are using outward facing social media. These go way beyond simply having a corporate Twitter feed or a page on Facebook.  Take a look at some of the ideas below – it may inspire your organization to take the next step towards an outward facing social media strategy.

Promoting corporate charitable and philanthropic activities: Does your company engage in philanthropic and charitable activities? Then consider using social media as a way to promote those activities.

Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer for SearchCIO.com, writes in the article “Social media and networking ushering in a 'third wave' of capitalism” that “Instead of spending $20 million on Super Bowl ads in 2010, PepsiCo Inc. launched the Pepsi Refresh Project, a social media site that is doling out $20 million in grants this year to projects submitted by and voted on by the public. The Coca-Cola Co. went one better. It launched a social media and networking promotion that called attention to its philanthropic arm, Live Positively.com.”  Hyundai is also supporting a charity called “Hyundai Hope On Wheels” in which it is donating $200 to help fight children’s cancer for every car it sells. Along with a dedicated web site, you can also “follow” their efforts on Facebook and Twitter.

Add an “extra dimension” to live events: If your organization puts on live events for customers, consider adding a real-time social component to the event. One of the simplest methods is to set up a Twitter “hash tag” for the event that presenters and attendees can use to share their comments and insights, as we did this past May at our Perspectives conference. There are also social tools that allow you to set up virtual “lounges” where attendees can meet, greet, and interact with other event attendees – and some of these tools can even allow you to create completely virtual events and shows (check out the On24 platform).

Solicit new product ideas: Instead of trying to come up with what your company thinks your clients and prospects would like to see in new products, why not use social media as a tool to solicit their input before you create the products? According to Patricia Seybold Group, “50% of your innovations can come from your customers. Why not spawn innovation by letting your customers co-design your next products, services, processes and business model?”

There are a couple of ways your organization can do this, depending on how daring you are. The safest way is to create a closed community that is “moderated” by one of your employees. You can pick and choose which customers and prospects you want to involve, and you can control the conversation. The more daring approach is to open it up to the entire web. Although you will probably get your share of inappropriate suggestions, you just might uncover some great ideas that otherwise would not have surfaced.

Look for new business models: Is there a way that your organization can use social media tools to radically improve your business model? The current ways of doing business (I create a product, I sell a product, you buy my product) are being supplanted by new models that engage customers from before their purchase, through the purchase process, their ongoing use, and hopefully their recommendation of your products and services. Is there a great new business model for your industry sitting out there waiting for your company to grab it and run with it?

Now is the time to start thinking and planning how your organization can take advantage of the benefits of outward facing social media.

There are some great titles in our Books24x7 digital books collection that can provide more insights on outward facing social media. If you are a Books24x7 subscriber, try searching on “social media and customers” or “web 2.0”. Here are a few of the titles that you might find interesting:

Tactical Transparency: How Leaders Can Leverage Social Media to Maximize Value and Build Their Brand

by Shel Holtz and John C. Havens 

Jossey-Bass © 2009 (321 pages)

 

 

 

 

The Digital Handshake: Seven Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business Using Social Media

by Paul Chaney

John Wiley & Sons © 2009 (272 pages)

 

 

 

 

 

Leveraging Social Media in Your Business (A Report)

by Matthew D. Lees  Patricia Seybold Group

Forget Social Learning! Make Learning Social Your Priority

By John Ambrose

 

Over the past 18 months, I’ve been delivering a variety of talks to audiences of learning professionals large and small.  The core premise is that

social learning, defined as the contextual blending of social conventions with learning content, will be profoundly transformative over the next decade.

  

 

Well, it’s time we stopped focusing on social learning.  That is, until we’ve mastered learning social.

 

 

What I mean is that every learning professional who intends to remain in this field during the next decade needs to take the plunge.  Now!  Because learning about social technologies comes from experiencing them, not just reading about them.  Like learning to swim, internalizing the real value of social technology requires active participation. 

  

 

Don’t just take my word for it.  American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) President and CEO Tony Bingham recently said, “Understanding the huge impact Web 2.0 technologies have on how the workforce learns is critical to engaging employees and customers, and ultimately, critical for an organization’s growth and success.”

  

 

As a learning profession, we have a long way to go.  ASTD’s recent report “The Rise of Social Media: Enhancing Collaboration and Productivity Across Generations,” found that only 24% of survey respondents report that their own informal learning activities include social media.  This jibes roughly with what I’ve seen from audiences in North America, but overseas I would put this in the single digits based on my informal polls.  We can do better.

  

 

Diving In or Sitting on the Edge of the Pool?

 

 

I found it interesting that the same ASTD study reported that ‘nearly all’ survey respondents indicated they ‘use social media’ in their personal lives.  I believe this obscures what’s really going on.  My hunch is respondents equate ‘using’ to ‘having used or having some basic understanding.’  The vast majority of learning professionals are not swimming in social media, rather they are dangling their legs into the water while they sit on the ledge of the pool. 

  

 

As proof, I’ve been conducting a little experiment with many audiences. I asked everyone to stand and then ask people to sit if they’ve used various social networks or technologies -- from more obscure to less.  In an audience of 75, I’d ask, do you use Orkut? Delicious?  Maybe one or two sit.  Foursquare? Yammer?  Maybe three or four more.  Twitter?  Maybe five, ten will then sit in a really wired crowd. Facebook gets a good chunk to sit, maybe 20 or 25.  Linked-in?  That gets another swath of those still standing to sit -- but not everyone.  Believe it or not in most audiences, there is still a cadre of learning professionals standing!  I resort to YouTube and email to get everyone in the room to sit.  

  

 

My experiment is fun, but the underlying message is serious.  Today’s learning professional is on the front lines of a sea change in how employees will learn.  Navigating this sea requires more than a tacit understanding of one aspect of the water.  It requires the ability to swim.

  

 

Here’s how to jump in and get wet:

  

 

Establish a Facebook profile.  Don’t worry about embarrassing your kids.  They have two profiles anyway – their real profile (for family and adults) and their pseudo profile (for talking to their peer circles).

  

 

Join one or more social communities on Linked-in.  A variety of SkillSoft groups have been created around the world, including SkillSoft eLearning and SkillSoft Government Users Group.

  

 

Get on Twitter.  I know you think it is a waste of time, but just create a profile anyway.  It’s simple and fast. Then use search.twitter.com to search on the teams “#lrnchat”, “#educhat” or “#elearning”.  The  “#” acts as a community tag so it is easy to find related posts.  These are some of the more popular and dynamic learning communities.  Explore.  Click a link.  Reply to a message with a comment of your own.  Congratulations, you just “tweeted”.  Now, follow those with comments you find interesting.

 

 

You are on your way.  You are now in the water.  Feels good, doesn’t it?

Social Learning to the Next Level with New Features in inGenius

By Pam Boiros

As you've read in earlier posts, we’ve shared regular updates about our social learning product, SkillSoft inGenius on Books24x7.  The feedback and reviews have been great, and we now have over 60 clients deploying inGenius, covering a potential audience size of 500,000+ learners.

 

A few weeks back, we released a number of important new feature enhancements to inGenius.  I would classify them all as “participation” features.  With more opportunities to engage with their community, connect, share, recommend and rate content, inGenius becomes an even stronger enterprise collaboration tool – and we expect participation levels to grow even more.   Here is an overview of the major enhancements we just rolled out.

 

Interests and Expertise: You can now declare, self-rate and share your areas of interest. There are three levels of expertise that you can declare: Learner, Experienced, or Expert.   This helps you find other community members with relevant interest areas – and help community members connect with you, too.

 

 

Recent Activity list Enhancements:  The Recent Activity list has been enhanced to provide information on other activities and the Recent Activity can now be tracked via RSS. The following are the new activities in the list:

• New users as they create a profile and join
• Recommendations (Person X recommends Title Y)
• Following activities (Person A is now following Person B)
• Who found community Notes and Comments "helpful"

  

Notifications Page:  There is now one place to go to view notifications of inGenius activities that directly affect you.  Notification also can be tracked using RSS, and each community member can decide which activities will generate notifications.

 

 

 

Ratings of Notes and Comments: You now have the ability to "rate" the Notes and Comments posted by other community members, by indicating if you found a Note or Comment "Helpful" or not.

 

 

Sharing Recommendations of Titles: You can now recommend titles and share specific reasons for your recommendations with your community.

 

Discover community members:  Part of the value of any social site is knowing who’s part of the community.   Is there anyone there worth collaborating with?  A “Browse People” option has been added to help with the discovery process:

 

 

Are you intrigued by these new enhancements?   Do you want to experience inGenius for yourself?  The inGenius “Early Look” Program still is available for learning leaders.  There is no cost or obligation associated with participating in “Early Look”, but we do solicit feedback from all participants via an online survey.    Interesting in checking out inGenius?  Drop me a line.  You also can check out our online inGenius tour or download our social learning infographic.

 

Latest Aberdeen Report on Social Learning Available

By Pam Boiros

As you’ve read in a variety of previous posts, we’ve been writing about social learning in general and SkillSoft inGenius on Books24x7, our digital books product, specifically.  The Aberdeen Group just published a Research Brief entitled “SkillSoft inGenius™: A Strategic Response to the Future of Learning”.  I’m happy to let you know that the full report is available as a complimentary download courtesy of SkillSoft.   This report is a follow on to a major research project Aberdeen conducted in September of 2009 that surveyed over 500 organizations on their learning and development programs. 

Some of the highlights of Aberdeen’s report “SkillSoft inGenius™: A Strategic Response to the Future of Learning” include:

- Social learning drives performance

- Organizations that want to sustain success are focused on developing the next generation of top performers

- Methodologies and tools must keep pace with the changing needs of the workforce

- Tools that leverage Web 2.0 functionality, such as inGenius, drive employee performance and productivity.

Download your free copy of this exciting and timely new research report from the SkillSoft website.