At this time of year, many magazine writers, bloggers, and analysts do one or two things: they take a look back at the past year's ups and downs and/or they make predictions (bold or otherwise) about the year ahead. As a blogger—and more generally as a human conditioned my entire life with a January through December calendar year—I can't help but find myself thinking along these lines as well.
I have many thoughts on both the year 2009 that we are wrapping up, and the year 2010 ahead of us (and beyond), so I'll share one such prediction with you now. This is a topic that I often touch on during my conference and webinar presentations on the topic of "Blending Web 2.0 Technologies with Traditional Formal Learning." Although each presentation instance is unique, many questions are asked regularly. One in particular I think is not only a sensible and good question to ask, but is particularly pressing these days because of the very difficult employment situation in the United States and in most of the world.
The question goes like this: "You say that Web 2.0/Social Learning technologies will not replace the use of classroom training or traditional e-learning, but will rather most often (and properly) be used to supplement these standard learning modalities, in order to better enable informal learning in our organizations. But with limited L&D budgets and resources, won't this mean a cut-back in classroom training and e-learning development, and thus job layoffs for some instructors, instructional designers, and subject matter experts?"
This is a good question, but I think the concern largely relies on a false assumption: that the people in those job roles will not have important roles to play in the realm of social learning. Tools such as wikis, blogs, forums, social networks, and so on most often work best when they have people performing specific supporting tasks. These tasks take time, and so should be part of the job descriptions of the people performing them. So the idea here is that people who today work entirely as instructors or instructional designers, or spend a lot of their time serving as subject matter experts within an organization, will continue to spend a lot of their time in those roles (perhaps most of it), but will also take on new roles such as:
- Blog author
- Forum moderator or discussion generator
- Wiki contributor and/or gardener (seeding, pruning, weeding, etc.)
- Podcast host/interviewer
- Significant ink bookmarker
- Significant micro-messaging contributor
- Social networking site profile administrator (and participant of course)
In this way, such key L&D team members will continue to provide formal learning (whether teaching, designing, or consulting) but will now also provide crucial support in enabling informal learning. This kind of learning has always been occurring in organizations, but by using Web 2.0/social media tools, at least some of that informal learning will become even more commonplace and powerful, and also become transparent to the organizational leaders, rather than staying largely hidden, untrackable, unsearchable, etc.
As an example, some of Element K's instructional designers—specifically those on our Business Skills team—continue to use our single-source authoring process to create outstanding e-learning and print courseware training materials. But a year ago they also started serving as forum moderators and blog authors for their respective areas of focus. It does require the right combination of aptitude, interest, and motivation to take on new tasks such as these, but fortunately our IDs have what it takes!
What about your organization? As your mix of learning approaches shifts to include more social learning, how are you going to provide the support necessary for it to succeed and truly have a positive impact on the organization? Who from amongst your current L&D team—whether instructors, instructional designers, subject matter experts, or others—will you rely on to take on new challenges in this arena?
— Thomas Stone (Tom_Stone@elementk.com)
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