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.

Got plans to be in Toronto this week?

Be sure to check out the International Federation of Training and Development Organisations (IFTDO) World Conference being held in conjunction with this year's Canadian Society for Training and Development (CSTD) annual conference, where dominKnow is releasing the workGroup Edition of our dominKnow Learning Content Management System (LCMS).

The dominKnow team is at booth 214 Tuesday evening, Oct. 20 and Wednesday Oct. 21 and Thursday Oct. 22 – so if you're in the neighbourhood, feel free to drop by!

We'll be more than happy to give you a tour of the workGroup Edition, which we're pretty excited about.

The workGroup Edition gives teams of up to five e-leaning authors the full feature set of our integrated Authoring Tool environment, plus all the benefits of working together using the LCMS's collaboration tools like our Design Notes feature, internal communication and RSS feeds to keep track of what's going on in your course projects at any time. It's SCORM-compliant so you can plug your completed courses into any third-party LMS without hassle.

Learning Content Management Systems have traditionally been seen as a tool for large enterprises, but many smaller organizations face the same issues of rapid content development, the need to share media assets like images and video files, and the critical requirement of having many people work together, from instructional designers to graphic artists to subject matter experts and reviewers. The dominKnow LCMS workgroup Edition is a hosted approach to helping smaller organizations create e-learning.

The dominKnow LCMS WorkGroup Edition allows teams to:
• Work together and collaborate within a single development environment
• Rapidly create online courses with pre-and post-testing
• Incorporate audio, video and animations to enrich the learning experience
• Share images and multimedia assets from a single, tracked asset library
• Quickly and easily update content as learning requirements change

Can't make it to the IFTDO and CSTD conference? Here's a quick way to learn more about the dominKnow LCMS workGroup Edition.

Hope to see you in Toronto!

Chris Van Wingerden is Vice President Learning Solutions at dominKnow Learning Systems.

Next week the dominKnow instructional design team is off to the Canadian Society for Training and Development (CSTD) conference in Toronto.

Of all the conferences of its kind that I have attended, the CSTD event is one of the best for the quality of the sessions. Since dominKnow offers a Learning Content Management System (LCMS) as well as learning solutions through courseware consultation and development, I have interests in many different areas. It is often difficult to choose a CSTD session to attend from amongst many worthwhile options.

If you're not familiar with CSTD, the conference is a great way to learn more. Our local Ottawa chapter recently held a great workshop on storytelling in the workplace, led by Jennifer Cayley and Lucie Roy. Sprinkled throughout the workshop were quotes on storytelling, leadership, and learning. One was from Alan Kay, the vice president at Walt Disney, who said, "Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories."

That's one of the things I look for at the conference... the opportunity to listen to and share stories with others working in training and development.

In previous years, I have come back to work with practical tips to improve workflow, write challenging assessments, motivate learners, and more. This year, I'm looking forward to keynote speakers David Weiss with Leadership Solutions, Ed Hoffman's Project Management and the Three Little Pigs: The Power of Stories, and Pamela Wallin's Cross Border Connections as well as sessions on emerging trends, Web 2.0, and learning strategy.

The dominKnow team will also be in the trade show in booth 611.

The exhibit floor is a good place for us to meet people interested in learning solutions, find out what others are doing, as well as chat to some of our current partners. We hope to see you there or in one of the sessions.

Catherine Orfald, Senior Instructional Designer