Bringing Social Media to the Organizational Learning Party - a CSTD Ottawa Event
Last Thursday, Feb. 25 saw a great turnout at the CSTD Ottawa chapter event on social media in learning.
Officially titled "What am I missing? Leveraging Social Media for Learning", the event was filled to capacity (and a bit more, even) for presenters Mary Myers, Senior Instructional Designer, Maritz Canada (@Mary_a_Myers ) and David Ransom, Senior Consultant, Knowledge & Collaboration, IBM Canada (@sitchaba).
Mary's portion of the presentation focused on her own experiences using social media as a learning tool and how that gives her inspiration for solving learning and training issue for her clients.
David brought an organizational perspective to the mix, with some great concrete examples of how companies are incorporating social media to solve learning and training problems.
There's a link to the presentation slides below, if you are interested.
Beyond the great insight from Mary and David, what also really interesting – and revealing – were the questions that came from the crowd. Two of the main themes raised were control and measurement.
The concern over control was voiced in a number of ways, from control over access to control over confidentiality to control over accuracy of information.
On the measurement front, as one audience member pointed out, training professionals report to someone and need show the effect and vale of what they are doing. Just how do you do that when you introduce social media tools into the learning mix?
Both of these topics are way too broad to be addressed here, but there's no doubt they are critical issues for learning and development professionals (and the organizations they work for) looking to harness the possibilities of social media tools.
Here at dominKnow, for example, we've really seen benefits from using Yammer, a Twitter-like application. We have a distributed work force, so Yammer not only keeps everyone in touch but has also turned into a great tool for sharing information like links to articles or examples of technology use. The communication benefits were what originally prompted us to try Yammer out – the learning benefits have been an unexpected bonus.
And speaking of Twitter, we've also recently taken to the Twitterverse. If you are interested, you can follow our @dominknow account – and don't hesitate to reach out to us!

Many thanks to Mary and David for sharing their knowledge and insight, and to the CSTD Ottawa committee (and a specific shout out to Shikha for a great job!) for putting together a great event.
If you want to see what the event was all about, here's a link to the slide deck.
Chris Van Wingerden is Vice President Learning Solutions at dominKnow Learning Systems.


