There’s an increasing awareness of the value of social learning in the workplace. Knowing that it exists is one thing; creating the scaffolding and support that allows people to capture, categorize, retrieve, and share what they learn is something else entirely.

In this session you will explore why eLearning practitioners and instructional designers are in a unique position to provide vision, leadership, and specific strategies to bring together informal social learning with formal eLearning and other training activities. You will examine tools for personal and social knowledge management, discussing their facets and merits as they pertain to various learning cultures and individual learning objectives. You will discuss examples of how eLearning courses dovetail with continuous individual learning to provide a more context-based and immediately applicable learning program that encourages individual learners to find, use, and share knowledge.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to leverage the forces that can amplify formal eLearning programs via already-in-place informal social learning
• How to analyze ways in which formal and informal learning can work together to reinforce broader learner goals
• How to identify ways to fold formal and informal online learning into a unified continuous-learning program
• How to use knowledge-management methods to extend and bind the larger learning program
• How to compare and contrast several existing online social learning tools for their fitness to specific learning needs

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, managers, directors, and VPs.

Technology discussed in this session:
Twitter, Scoop.it, Google+, Delicious, and Diigo.