In the past, this immediate social environment was limited to the space within which people physically close to us could interact with us. With media technology, this space has expanded considerably. First for educators and trainers, it merely led to a conscious effort to use media technology as a transmitter, to facilitate communication. This meant the use of the technology was mediated by a conscios decision to achieve a learning outcome designed to be achieved through that specific use of that technology. While this can have an effect, it is not natural. Once again, we succeed in decoupling the natural instincts from the experience in order to wield a control over the environment that we feel is necessary for learning to occur.

Now, social media is not a means to communicate but rather a space where people exist and have formed identities and practices. It’s a place of communities for all intents purposes and the interactions that exists within these communities are rich with experiences.

To simply try to embed classrooms or training sessions within social media spaces is unnatural. The challenge this gives us is to rethink our approach to formal learning, classrooms and training sessions. We need to ask ourselves what exactly do we want the people we are dealing with to achieve? How does this fit into their daily life and routines? How is it part of the whole that is their life and thus what is the best way to get there.

We need to separate the information we believe they need from the understanding we want to see them demonstrate. We need to have clarity on how they could (not will) use this knowledge in their natural activities. We need to break up the learning into these types of constituent chunks (non-sequential) and embed these chunks in the natural environment in various ways. To do this, we need to spend more time studying their natural environment and practices and blend in.

This would have been difficult years ago before technology was an integral part of our natural world and experiences, but now, it’s not only possible, it’s been done unoffocially with syndicated content, platforms like Twitter and facebook, devices like iPhones, blackberries, android, etc thus learning professionals have no excuse.

We need to start designing for higher outcomes. Current focus on objective outcomes focused on the accummulation of information are old school and a waste of time. Our designs should focus more on supporting the strategic selection and effective application of information as required by the interpretation of emerging situations.

We need to spend a lot more time asking how people access, select and use information in the various domains of activity…probably even more than what information they are accessing…

I’ll stop here. Got thinking about this this morning.