I thought Girl Geeks might be interested in a post by Harold Jarche that I came across courtesy of @josiefraser on Twitter.

I’d really like it if you could read it and give us some feedback here at Girl Geek Scotland. Perhaps you have some ideas about how we can improve our network? Perhaps you can help us do this too?

Here  is a summary of the post:

“All organizational value is created by teams and networks. Furthermore, learning may be generated in teams but even this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks. Social networks are the primary conduit for effective organizational performance. Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization.”

He outlines Jon Husbands work on “wirearchy” which describes a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based primarily on trust: “Communications without trust are just noise, not accepted and never internalized to the recipient” Without those trust networks within organisations, implementation of learning into tangible organisational outputs will be blocked.

About 80% of learning in the workplace comes through informal learning, which “happened by accident or the result of observation, coversation and time in the job.”

Implementing Social Learning in the Workplace

For me this section on how to analyse and implement Social Learning is most interesting. This uses Jane Harts five ways of using social media for learning in the organisation:

ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning: from Stocks to Flow

Online communication can be divided into Stocks (information that is archived and organized for reference and retrieval) and Flows (timely and engaging conversations between people, including voice or written communications)

“the Web is an environment more suited to just-in-time learning than the outdated course model.”

PDL – Personal Directed Learning: from Clockwork & Predictable to Complexity & Surprising

Complexity, or maybe our appreciation of it, has rendered the world unpredictable, so the orientation of learning is shifting from past (efficiency, best practice) to future (creative response, innovation).

GDL – Group Directed Learning: from Worker Centric to Team Centric

Bloggers have learned how powerful a learning medium they have only after blogging for an extended period. With the increased use of distributed work groups, it is even more important to foster social learning and web media are the current tools at hand.

IOL – Intra-Organizational Learning: from Subject Matter Experts to Subject Matter Networks

Subject Matter Networks (Mark Oehlert) are a way of finding organisational knowledge. Collaborative groups are better at making decisions and getting things done. The constraints of the group help to achieve defined goals.

FSL – Formal Structured Learning: from Curriculum to Competency

Work competencies will still need to be developed through practice and appropriate feedback (what training does well) but that practice will have to be directly relevant to the individual or group

In Conclusion

We need to share more of our work experiences in order to grow trusted networks. This is social learning and it is critical for networked organizational effectiveness.

I highly recommend you read the whole article.

http://www.jarche.com/2010/02/a-framework-for-social-learning-in-the-enterprise/

Please also leave comments for us here about how social media can should or could  be implemented in your workplace. Or if you have any ideas about how Girl Geek Scotland can develop a stronger social learning network please let us know.

cheers

morna/ : )