AMERiCA LEARNiNG MEDiA

The learning from an experience is only proven after the event, when the connections you made start to stick and change the way you think and behave. To facilitate the investigation we decided to eat our own metaphorical dog food and do the whole LAB online as a social learning event. by Ben Betts, CEO of HT2

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been facilitating an online LAB, courtesy of the Masie Consortium, investigating social learning. We set out to investigate three key areas:

1. How is the role of social learning evolving in our organisations?

2. How is curation impacting the social learning mix?

3. What effect is gamification having on social?

To facilitate the investigation we decided to eat our own metaphorical dog food and do the whole LAB online as a social learning event. We used Curatr to seed content for discussion into a series of sequential levels. Users would need to contribute in order to earn ‘experience points’ and rise through the levels to the finish.

I was delighted with the level of participation the LAB gave to the event. We had around 50 register to take part; 35 logged on and 20 went on to really contribute meaningfully to the debate. That might at first glance appear like a poor turnout, but the fact is this was more akin to a MOOC than anything else and getting 40% of your audience engaged in a MOOC is pretty much unheard. Over the course of two weeks, working in their spare time, our LAB contributed over 25,000 words to the debate and doubled the amount of content we had curated initially.

Did we learn anything?

I hate it when you get asked immediately at the end of a session ‘what have you learned?’ For me, the learning from an experience is only proven after the event, when the connections you made start to stick and change the way you think and behave. It’s now been about a week and a half since the end of the LAB and I think I’m ready to commit a few key insights to paper.

First, I’ve been really adamant in the past about my stance on social and learning; that all learning is inherently social. We had some philosophical debates about the people reading books on deserted islands. I still think I’m right; others think I’m being pedantic. I think maybe they are right too. But perhaps I get too easily drawn into big philosophy debates about the nature of learning. Does anybody care about this stuff? Or do we just want results? I think maybe it’s the latter, despite my readiness to talk about the former.

Second, the group’s contributions on gamification mentioned the need for personal meaning time and again. For instance, one participant wrote, “my kids and I are members of the Kahn Academy, and we compete to get moon and earth badges, and what not. Do I care about the type of badge I’m getting? Not a bit! But it is socially meaningful for us to share this experience together.” I think that’s something significant; that participants in a gamified experience need to be able to select for themselves what they choose to pursue. Simply telling people that points or badges are important doesn’t make it so. Especially when they have no inherent value.

Third and finally, I got really reinforced around the concept of curating content as the basis of a learning experience. It took me less than a day to gather content from around the web to seed our conversations. Participants reported spending up to 4 or 5 hours each browsing, reading, commenting and curating around these insights. This flips the notion of eLearning design on its head; where hundreds of hours of design yield a few minutes of instructional experience. My message is simple; stop trying to make the perfect piece of content. You never will. Allow your learners to select the most relevant resources for themselves.

As a side note to this last piece, all but one of the pieces of content I gathered was social in some way – a user-generated video or a blog for example. These were all bite-sized pieces of less than 10 minutes content, most were less than 5. Just once I snuck in a PDF article taken from a book. It was about 10 pages long. Nearly everyone hated it. Not because the content was inherently bad; some participants found meaning in the message. It’s just they hated having to scroll down page after page of text.

* Ben Betts is passionate about innovations in learning technology. He is CEO of HT2, a learning tech company with bases in the UK and USA. HT2 do groundbreaking work in social, mobile and game-based learning. Ben is part of the team behind the Curatr collaborative learning platform, which was founded on my research at the International Digital Lab, Warwick University.

Source: http://www.ht2.co.uk/ben/