Last week I posted about the 140 University service that I had set up to demonstrate the potential of Twitter and Facebook as formal learning tools - to deliver and share "classes" in the form of daily knowledge nuggets. In the short time this has been live, it has proven to be a popular idea, and at the time of writing there are now over 320 followers on Twitter and over 120 Facebook fans, with many others simply reading the archived nuggets at the website.
I have now set up a "sister service" that operates along the same lines, but is for people to ...
"discover and share daily knowledge and skill nuggets with interesting links - web pages, videos, podcasts and other free resources via Twitter, Yammer or Facebook- in less than 140 characters - to support their personal productivity and performance in the workplace."
It is the first day of the Learning Technologies Conference in London, where I am involved in a number of sessions, so I thought this was a good day to launch the service formally.
This free service is called the 140 Learning Centre. Follow the link for full information about it.
I'd like to think that it demonstrates the way that L&D departments could use these tools to provide relevant and useful resources in an ongoing way to their employeers, which they can then comment on as well as contribute to, thereby build a useful organisational knowledge base of resources.
@ Jane,
I've been following the 140 learning centre on twitter.
The knowledge nuggets are interesting. But in order to promote retention within the learner, these nuggets should be organized in a mental schema or a connection should be made with the prior knowledge.
So, in my view, these nuggets are only the first step. How do you propose actual learning could be achieved?
Posted by: Tobi Boas | 01 February 2010 at 09:34 AM
Hi Tobi, thanks for your comment. This is the first project in the 140university experiment; its purpose was to provide free-standing "classes" of knowledge nuggets with supporting links for follow-up materials. Firstly, the idea is that learners should explore what is of interest to them; there is certainly no intention to try and "measure" whether any learning takes place; it will be up to each indidivual learner to decide whether the "class" was of interest or they got anything from it - aka "learned" from it. (Personally, I can tell you that by devising the "classes" in the first place, I have actually learnt a lot myself!) Secondly, there was no also intention to "connect" the classes together. A second project, to be released shortly, will look at provding a series of sequential "connected" nuggets in a more structured format. Thirdly, this is not a "traditional" university - it tries to incorporate aspects of formal, personal, and accidental learning in one, and therefore challenges traditional notions of what "learning" is all about
Posted by: Jane Hart | 01 February 2010 at 06:29 PM
Hi Jane,
Thank you for your clear answer. So, this is actually experimental research? :-) I like the fact that you look at it from a point of view that is more interdisciplinary than a lot of other research that is going on right now. I’m curious about the second project. I will keep on following you.
Posted by: Tobi Boas | 02 February 2010 at 08:42 AM
Tobi - maybe you missed the initial posting at 140university here - http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/2010/01/140-university.html
Posted by: Jane Hart | 02 February 2010 at 10:55 AM
Hi Jane,
I've actually read the initial posting and I understand the purpose behind this. I just mean that I like your approach and that it is like experimental research because it hasn't been done before.
Posted by: Tobi Boas | 03 February 2010 at 09:21 AM