My Challenge to the Collective

Welcome! You are here! I am here. Why are we here? Good question. I want to know the same thing; that is what I am here to discover.

This past Thursday, I was fortunate to attend an event sponsored by my networking group of Vancouver learning professionals. Bradley Shende, CEO of MEDIA2O (M2O), chatted with us about how he and his team are using social media to share information with the masses in a quick and inexpensive manner (and how this relates to possibilities in training).

In short, I was inspired – inspired by what he told us has been done, inspired by what he told us could be done, inspired to learn more about this whole area of life that I know next to nothing about.

As soon as I got home, I explored some writing I did about 8 years ago about why I got into eLearning in the first place. I wrote as part of my application to a Masters in Educational Technology degree program, "I did not always have this fascination for technology, but as times changed, so did I." Ironic, considering that aside from a brief foray into the Facebook
phenomenon, I have consciously resisted almost all forms of social media. I text. I email. I phone... sometimes, but that is it. It seems that this time, the times have changed but I did not.

So, here I am-ready for an experiment in social media. As an instructional designer working with large, corporate clients, my goal is to help them find the most effective ways to train their staff. If "80% of the money organizations commit to training is used for formal learning, but 80-90% of learning actually takes place informally" (Jay Cross reference), and if social media is one of the main ways people are communicating and sharing information today, then I would like to find a way to use social media effectively in corporate learning programs.

Some believe that the answers to all questions can be found in the collective. So, to the collective, I pose this challenge:
Let us find a way to showcase effective corporate learning in action using social media and technology to its best advantage (but we've got to keep costs and development time down too). Anyone with me?