...what does it mean?

Last week I took part in a webinar that had different functions to those I have attended previously. There was a chat board for synchronous comments to be made. There were 220 people on this webinar - hence it was difficult to read them all. However it was interesting to be involved in, as I had not experienced this before.

Comments ranged from answers to questions asked, links to other information and a huge amount of humour. (My personal favourite was in reference to someone called Norman Lamont, who was asked if he was 'the' Norman Lamont, which then sparked  a series of Spartacus style,'no, I am Norman Lamont' - you had to be there I think!)
Anyway, what I discovered was that for me, this made the session more dimensional and personal. I was still listening to the webinar, but I was also feeling part of the community of listeners, laughing along and connecting with their links.

Now I am sure that not everyone felt the same, and I guess when your audience is unknown and large then some will like it, some will not. A transcript was available afterwards - but that does take out some of the fun and context of the chat, although it does let you see the actual answers to the questions - the webinar was about using social media in employee learning.

When designing learning we need to decide, just as we do in f2f learning, what it is that we want to achieve. How much integration is needed for the learner? Do we want them to focus on the task,  and build their relationships based on group identity, or do we want to develop the individual, so that more diverse views come through?

We know that different methods may afford different interactions, so how do we decide which is appropriate? If we believe that everyone decides what personality they want to portray, do we need to waste time with the social interactions in order for people to get to know each other?
Do we need to include visually rich media, or does that just get in the way?Should we try and build into the learning the different support elements, so people people can start to socialise as they share information, collaborate, support and analyse? How important is colloboration in the process?

It goes back to principals of planning learning. What is it that you want to achieve - knowledge, competance, change of attitute? And who are your learners? Understanding your learners and knowing your objectives, you can decide what methods are suitable to use in the time available.

Last week I also join Twitter. I joined in a Thursday night phenomena called #lrnchat (Learn chat). It's a crazy couple of hours where people from all over the word talk about learning. Here, the first thing they ask is that your state you name and where you are. This is the icebreaker so people can get started. They have a netiquette. They have a structure. And yet sometimes there can be 100 replies at once. You have to be a certain kind of person to get involved, although I am sure there are hundreds of lurkers, but it has taken something that is very simple, with no rich media, or construction of social cues, and created an engaging community.

By knowing your audience, you can design something that works for them, knowing that even in f2f environments you can never get it 100% right.