The opportunities to broaden the reach of the L&D department, and
promote participant interaction and shared learning, are now limitless
with social media.
We’re working in a wonderful era of easy-to-use, readily available
social media technologies ideally suited to learning and instruction.
These tools―blogs, wikis, social networking sites, microblog sites,
video sites, and more―provide wonderful, new opportunities to invite
participation from our learners.
Anecdotal reports from learning and development (L&D)
professionals indicate that trainers and instructional designers are
enthusiastic about and interested in using new tools and approaches, but
just don’t have a good understanding of how to do so. Industry news and
technology aficionados offer frequent updates about new social media
tools (such as the recently launched Google+) or updates to old
ones—often without much in the way of ideas for integrating them into
practice.
Advantages are many: Social media allow more participation over a
span of time, encourage people to “learn out loud” for the benefit of
others, and provide ways to more closely embed learning into work. So
what are some strategies for workplace learning practitioners seeking to
incorporate these new tools into their training design?
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