The Human Factor: Creating Opportunities to Participate in Social Learning

It isn’t hard tounderstand why the idea of computer-mediated social learning has suchappeal. Learning has been both social and informal for most of humanhistory. As we interact with peers, experts, and novices on a topic,we come to develop a shared understanding of the world.Less-experienced members of the community learn from those who aremore experienced, gaining more influence in the group as their skillsgrow.

If you’ve evertried to move the social learning dynamic to a computer-mediateddiscussion, though, you’ve probably noticed first-hand that givinglearners a forum where discussion can take place is not enough tocreate a social learning environment. The dynamic in acomputer-mediated learning community can leave learners missing thesense of presence that would give them a reason to participate in thediscussion.

Social learningworks well in real life because it offers the individual learner somany opportunities for feedback. In real life, group members interactwith one another frequently, giving them any number of opportunitiesto get direct feedback from a peer or mentor, or to simply findpoints of comparison to peers. Feedback is a byproduct of living andworking in a community.

A community of newcomers

Manycomputer-mediated learning communities face two barriers todeveloping a sense of presence and a real-world social dynamic.

First, the learningcommunity itself may not have existed prior to its creation as anonline community. It’s a community of newcomers. No member of thegroup has yet established a reputation, whether as an expert or as anovice. Community members may have a deep, moderate, or passinginterest in the subject matter, and little sense of the othermembers.

If there’s nodiscussion taking place when members first join, learners may or maynot attempt to start a conversation. To an expert, a lack ofdiscussion threads may signal a lack of interest on the part of otherparticipants. To a novice, the lack of threads may signal a communitythat cannot offer help.

The fact that somemembers of the new community won’t have an intrinsic understandingof how to work in an online medium is an added obstacle. Asking thegroup to help establish the ground rules of the community is one wayto get past it, and to initiate conversation. What kinds of topicsbelong in the forum? Is it acceptable for a member to “Favorite”(put a star on) his or her own entry? How can we use the features ofour tool of choice to recognize good contributions to the community?

Fitting social learning into the rhythm of everyday life

Generally speaking,the more time that passes between a learner’s contribution and aresponse from another participant, the less the learner is interestedin participating in the environment. Like their real-worldcounterparts, members of computer-mediated learning communitiesthrive on feedback. Unfortunately, computer-mediated communities canbe easily forgotten or ignored by members who have a number ofpriorities competing for their attention.

The single bestpredictor of whether a learner will engage in your learning communityis whether or not the learner is in the habit of logging in to thesocial learning platform. Clearly, if they’re not logging in, theywon’t be contributing to the discussion in your community.

One way toencourage users to log in is to keep track of activities that takeplace in the larger community, and to summarize those activities foryour learners. You might send out a weekly e-mail to your community,highlighting some of the more interesting blog entries, bookmarkedarticles, profiles of community members, or files shared within thesocial learning platform. In any reasonably large organization, itshouldn’t be difficult to find enough interesting material to writea one-page highlight sheet.

My preferred spinon this technique is to create a virtual quiz game about theplatform, similar to NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. Giveyour group a summary of four entries that may or may not havehappened in the learning platform within the last week, and let themtell you which of the entries is false. They’ll have to log in tobe able to find the answer to the question, and while they’rethere, they may decide to contribute to your learning community.

As the moderator ofa learning community, you can influence your community to think ofsocial learning as a fun, interesting, and worthwhile activity. It’sthe first step to getting good participation and fostering learningin a social media environment.