I've been reading Maish Nichani's elearningpost for a long time now, but on the first day of DevLearn he made a very perceptive remark ...
"But all of this talk on social media I heard had a lot to say about the media part but very little on the learning part. They are still advocating the creating and access to content with very little attention on why this is being done and how is it going to help learning and improve performance in the long run. The systems view I think is missing here. The mantra seems to be “get social and you’ll learn”. This has a lot to say about the maturity of Learning 2.0."
I know I have been guilty of posting simply about social media tools on many occasions because I anticipated that others would EXTRAPOLATE how they could be used within a "learning" context. I have released that this is not always that easy, which was one of the reasons I compiled the 100+ ways social media could be used for learning list. So in the future I am going to try and be much more specific about the value of social media tools for teaching and learning. I certainly don't think it is a case of "get social and you'll learn" AND YET there IS a lot in that- because learning is not necessarily a conscious process. AND additionally Social Learning can ALSO be serendipitous - by connecting and conversing with more people there is the likelihood you will LEARN something new ...
I've introduced a lot of thoughts in that paragraph, so I think they will need some sorting out, which'll have to be the subject of another posting ...
In the meantime, what do you think? Is it enough to talk about the social media themselves, or demonstrate their APPLICABILITY to learning or improving performance.
