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Thursday, August 06, 2009

Case Studies of Informal or Social Learning

I'm looking to find lots of examples of where informal or social learning has been used successfully in the workplace and where it was led by the L&D organization. This can either be already written up, or it can be the name of a person and organization where it was done.

Can you provide me pointers?

If you would be more comfortable, feel free to send me information via an email: akarrer@techempower.com.

9 comments:

Bill said...

Hello Tony:

Are you going to post the examples that are sent to you? Thanks.

Bill Brantley

Tony Karrer said...

Yes. If I get any. :)

Unknown said...

Tony, How are you defining "used Successfully"?

Tony Karrer said...

Mark - good question. With this inquiry, I'm meaning that fairly broadly, i.e., L&D believes it was successful for them based on how they defined success. Likely this implies there was adoption, general acceptance and value was added.

Spring2Life said...

Tony, we have some interesting examples coming out of Communications Dept at OSU. Not sure if you want private enterprise only.

Unknown said...

Tony,

I can't point to a specific case but would note that the eLearning Guild's research on m-learning back in 2008 already showed informal uses of formal content via mobile phones. I wrote the following on the findings:

---The eLearning Guild recently released its 2008 report on its m-Learning survey. The report notes that 8% of the 1,364 members completing the Mobile Learning survey indicated their organizations have implemented m-Learning. At the same time, 17.3% of the 2,635 eLearning Guild members who updated their training modality profiles over the past year noted use of m-Learning "sometimes or often" by their organizations. The eLearning Guild report accounts for the discrepancy as follows:

"While 8% of members may have engaged in creating a formal m-Learning intervention, many more learners are in fact accessing learning and/or performance support content from a mobile device, even if the designer of that content did not have a mobile device in mind. That is, people explicitly created 8% of the m-Learning implementations, but people “organically” accessed 17.3% of them."

In other words, eLearning content is often available to learners independent of the intent of the original designers. Such dual use appears to relate to the increasing availability of cell phones that provide rather good web browsing capabilities, the iPhone serving as the exemplary device in this regard. Indeed, the eLearning Guild report advocates that "some Guild members need to get out of the trench of thinking 'm-Training' and think 'm-Performance'."---

Unknown said...

Tony, my earlier comment reminded me of a thread in the discussions on the learningtrends web site,

http://learntrends.ning.com/forum/topics/please-share-your-reallife

Also, wouldn't Polizzi's experience from Intuit, reported in the most recent webinar, apply to this question as well?

Tony Karrer said...

Chris - if it's for workplace learning - as opposed to student education - then I'm interested. Can you connect with me via email in that case?

Larry - thanks for the pointers.

And the Intuit example is a great one. Part of the reason I'm looking for more.

Poonam said...

Hi Dr.Tony,

I have sent you an email on how we use TeemingPod at our workplace to share information.

Hope that helps. Please do let me know if the information was helpful to you.

Thanks,
Poonam