Nonprofit Capacity Building and Training

The truth is, there are no learning problems in corporate settings. There are only people unwilling to learn.

Robin Good outlines some reasons why curation is important for education and learning.  These are true for learning for nonprofit professionals.

This white paper is by Jane Hart, one of the leading experts at the interaction of social networks and workplace learning.     Social learning is not simply an extension of e-learning or even a new training trend.

It is the way we have always learned from each other - from our peers or our family.

Social tools can enhance natural social learning takes place through knowledge sharing and collaboration -- what I like to call peer learning.

Jane does an annual survey of tools for social learning.  Says that connectedness is transforming the way we learn as follows:

* Learning from a professional network of trusted colleagues - where they can ask and answer questions

* Keep on top of trends and developments in their field

* Just in time learning

* Participate in wider offerings online

* Share knowledge and content with others

* Collaborative activiites.

Social learning goes beyond "“knowledge dumps tarted up with trivial interactions”. 

For genuine social interaction to take place it needs to be relevant, purposeful and appealing in order to stimulate a real desire or need to engage. It needs to be much more in tune with the ways people interact on the Social Web, and which embody the underlying open ethos that people enjoy. Social tools are after all fundamentally “enabling” tools not “command and control” tools. - 

Some new approaches:

1.)  Backchannel Learning

2.) Online Social Workshops: Just enough structure and content to facilitate conversation

3.) Tiny Training

4)  Social Onboarding

5 Social Mentoring

Continuous activities

• 10 minutes a day – provide a daily link to a place where individuals can spend just 10 minutes learning something new.  Note: 10 minutes a day, each weekday adds up to around 6 days of training in a year!
• Live chats – run regular live Twitter-like live chat sessions on different topics. They might just take place over 1 hour or be a longer all-day event that people can join in at any time.
• Hot seats – put one of your people (e.g. CEO or a leading expert) in the hot seat for a period of time, and encourage employees to ask them questions.
• Book club – organise a monthly time for conversation around a book of interest.
• Lunch’n’Learns – ask someone to lead a short informal session on a topic of interest to them. This might be purely conversational or involve a web meeting or face-to-face meeting, with the ELN used as a backchannel.

Co learning online