Social Learning (social Pedagogy) - New Developments in Social Learning

New Developments in Social Learning

With the growing use of social media, social learning is also more and more interpreted as learning with social media. Social Learning through open platforms like Facebook or closed platforms like Corporate Social Learning Network is growing up rapidly. Social Media can be used by employees to contribute, store, discover, search, learn and relearn, action, and review knowledge and skills, making hidden information and knowledge explicit. From an employee's or learner's point - this is also considered as "personal knowledge management" or "smart working" - e.g. using blogs to reflect their work, or using user generated content via platforms like Wikipedia or YouTube to learn on demand, e.g. when they have a question or problem. From an organizational point of view, social learning can be added as a element to formal learning like courses or curricula - to add discussions, sharing of experiences and lessons learned. Also social learning can be driven more stand-alone - e.g. to create Communities of Practice for similar groups like new employees (called onboarding), team or project team members or other similar groups. The goal for the organizations is to make learning more effective. The new connotation of social learning is also pushed by software companies who want to sell social learning tools (like SAP AG or Microsoft). However practitioners agree that social learning is more than social media.