Out of the Box: The Impact of Social on Learning

Social technologies have reinvented the way we communicate, share, evaluate information, provide value, play and increasingly work. Social in the enterprise is having a profound effect on the speed with which information is captured, categorized, and searchable, giving visibility and voice to valuable assets within an organization. In short, a continuous development environment (CDE), is a kind of learning ecosystem comprised of formal and informal content, online social interaction, and smarter knowledge management, which is facilitated through the use of enterprise social media and collaboration technologies. This combination of content and resources accessed through a social collaboration platform is the foundation of the CDE.

The evolution of technology and learning is swerving into new but familiar territory. A very short history of teaching and learning might start with on-the-job training. Our Paleolithic ancestors taught us how to use tools, hunt, start fires etc. The experienced taught the inexperienced. It was a great approach because it was all about transferring knowledge to the job. It worked so well that it is one of the most common methods of training to this day. Of course it didn’t scale very well.

The next blip on our historic ride takes us to the apprenticeship model which created a structure for learning new skills while working up through the ranks and it was scalable.

Zooming ahead to the nineteenth century, the factory model of learning began to dominate training in schools and ultimately in the workplace. The idea was to provide a systematic, repeatable process to prepare a nation to transition to an industrialized economy.

With war time came an intensified effort to systematize everything from the production line to education. Experimenting with pedagogy and technology lead to innovations in “teaching machines” like The Pressey Testing Machine. The intent was to provide self-paced instruction with immediate feedback in a stand-alone device without the need for human intervention. This was particularly suited for drill and practice applications; however, the concept is not too far afield from contemporary eLearning where the instruction and the feedback are encapsulated into a single device and program without the need for human intervention.

The rise of social presents an amalgam of technology and human interaction unlike any before it. The technology facilitates the interaction and in the case of instruction and performance support, social interaction can be a key factor in the design of the solution. In many ways it is about breaking open the box and tapping into the human element en masse. In a CDE, social technologies can support performance across the learning spectrum including instructional assets that incorporate social interaction as a part of the learning experience, to identifying and sharing relevant resources, to providing just-in-time performance support.

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