This Tuesday I’ll be speaking at the Association New Media Summit hosted by Peach New Media. My topic is Learning 2.0, and as I have been working on the presentation, I’ve been trying to come up with a brief way to explain why I think it is such an important concept – one that goes right to the heart of strategy on the social Web.
The image above is how I usually illustrate “Learning 2.0″ as it plays out in the world of traditional education and professional development. (If you are viewing this on e-mail and can’t load images or otherwise do not see the image, click through to the original post.)
In the world of Learning 2.0, walls between classrooms break down. There is not the sort of teacher-student hierarchy like you find in traditional, formal education. Rather, everyone is a student, and everyone has the potential to be a teacher. What drives the connections – the arrows in the illustration – is a desire to learn and a desire to share expertise. These are, I believe, very basic human desires, and all the new tools of the social Web – blogs, wikis, social networks, etc. – help us satisfy these desires in ways that were never possible before.
It’s important to recognize that this dynamic isn’t really all that different from what you find across the social Web as a whole. Here, for example, is how connections across the worldwide user base for the photo-sharing service Flickr mapped out just a few years ago. It’s the same sort of thing as above, but on a massive scale:
Why do people make these connections? In the case of Flickr, the obvious “social object” is photos: people connect with each other because they have photos to share and they want to see other people’s photos. A similar thing happens with videos on YouTube.
Aside from the obvious social objects that exist in these networks, I’d argue that there is a higher level object – call it a “meta” object, if you want to get academic about it – that often drives interaction: namely, learning: People in these networks are learning from and about each other, and the core objects – photos and videos – help make this possible.
Important caveat: To accept this argument, you’ll have to get past the idea that “learning” is equivalent to formal education. I’m talking about learning in a fundamental, psychological sense.
And here’s the thing – if you understand that learning in this fundamental sense can be a highly effective glue for holding social networks together, you can focus in on maximizing the network’s potential for providing valuable learning experiences. You can use an understanding of learning to drive strategy.
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the most effective ways to engender learning in the informal, psychological sense of the word is to provide for formal educational objects within the network. Articles, videos, tutorials, etc – these are often great catalysts for the informal learning connections that generate value in a network.
I think there are great opportunities for membership organizations to leverage formal educational activities as a way to generate more value within their social networks, and conversely, to make their formal educational offerings more valuable by making them more social. That is part of what I will talk about at the New Media Summit.
I also think there are interesting ways that an understanding of learning can help commercial organizations cultivate customer communities and even create new, revenue-generating products that leverage Learning 2.0. Stephen Covey certainly understands that. So does Brian Clark.
Bottom line: Learning 2.0 is woven into the fabric of the social Web, and vice-versa. I think a Web strategy that doesn’t take it into account will most likely leave many opportunities on the table. What do you think?
Jeff
P.S. – If this is a topic that interests you, you may also want to check out the free eBook, Learning 2.0 for Associations.
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