Learning Communities

Kelsey, brought up the use of blogs, wikis, and discussion forums. Lately, for the past couple of years that is, I've been trying to develop communities of learners via these types of tools. 

The idea came to me during Hurricane Harvey when my neighborhood had to evacuate due to potential floods. Instead of going to the newspaper, the television, the phone or any other conventional source, the entire neighborhood got their news from a Facebook Community page. It stunned me that we all, en masse, eschewed the more conventional for the passive stream of information coming from our neighbors writing and sharing together. I wondered if we might find a way to share learning in much the same way. 

At my old organization, a contracting company, we created a page to help develop leaders in the organization. We invited all supervisors, managers, and directors to be a part of it. We found that supervisors enjoyed the opportunity to share their experience across the organization and having a line of communication to the upper leadership. Now, I am trying to do the same thing with our leadership training. We find that we get wonderful engagement from the learners when they are in the building, but once they go back to their jobs, that connection is lost. I want to find a way to keep that connection going. Allow the learners to tap into the resource as needed. Look through posts to find answers to what they need. 

I like having that chance to hunt through posts and find the one that I want, I'm sure they would too. Blogs and wikis and discussion boards help facilitate that style of learning and I'd love to see it become a bigger part of our learning community.