Blog

Let's say you're in charge of creating a program that influences a change in behavior: reducing texting and driving among new drivers. You have the choice to either create a document that can be emailed to students, or to create a visual piece that gets your message across.

Which would you choose? A PowerPoint file that reviews reasons why drinking and texting is bad…

…or a wrecked car display at the school with a reminder to avoid texting and driving?

Which do you think will evoke more emotions?

Which do you think will come to the driver's mind as he or she decides whether or not to text and drive? Why?

Emotions act as the framework that learners of all ages use to interpret meaning. They play a major role in defining our personalities. We make thousands of decisions every day based on our emotions. In his book Brain-Based Learning, Eric Jensen describes that emotions also have the ability to influence how we learn by:

• Helping us figure out what's real and what we believe and feel
• Activating long-term memory; the more intense the amygdala arousal, the stronger the imprint
• Helping us make faster decisions by using gut judgment
• Helping us engage our values while making decisions

The old way of thinking was that rational decision-making was the way to go; eliminate feelings and let the pros and cons guide the way. But modern brain research casts a new light on the important role of emotions in learning and decision-making.

According to research by the Center for Development and Learning, the brain relies on emotions to drive action. The limbic system in the middle of the brain is where we determine and manage our emotions and behavior. In response to internal and external stimuli, the amygdala releases chemicals that stimulate our brain, which can help us process and remember information. When the limbic system receives information, it sets the "emotional tone" of the information before sending it to the cortex for processing.

When the brain interprets information as positive, it sends off a signal of purpose and excitement and directs our behavior toward a goal. The result is motivated learning, thinking, and enhanced memory. But when information is interpreted in a negative manner, chemicals are released in the bloodstream that produce a range of stress-related bodily responses, like sweaty palms, internal tension, and increased blood pressure. These emotions often prevent us from learning and remembering.

Trainers and educators can enhance learners' ability to absorb new information by consciously allowing emotions to help shape their experience instead of shutting them out. Here are some ideas for incorporating emotional aspects of learning into your curriculum.

• Provide projects that are personally meaningful to the learners.
• Design a classroom environment that's comfortable and allows for non-threatening collaboration.
• When reviewing goals for learning, ask your learners why they want to reach them, and encourage them to share their answers with other participants. According to Jensen, "It is the emotions behind the goals that provide the energy to accomplish them."
• To minimize stress, make sure helpful resources are available for every learner.
• Try to engage as many senses as possible. When multiple senses are engaged, the brain has a very rich learning experience.
• Encourage learners to discuss feelings and emotions that relate to the new material. 

Is emotional learning part of your training program? Ask us how we can help.

A combination of “crowd” and “outsourcing,” the term “crowdsourcing” was coined by Jeff Howe who wrote an overview about it for Wired magazine in 2006. Here’s how he described the concept: “Hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblers suddenly have a market for their efforts, as smart companies in industries as disparate as pharmaceuticals and television discover ways to tap the latent talent of the crowd….It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing.”

We’re in a new age of connectivity with the Internet. Despite all the distractions, the Internet era is helping us get back to our roots: forming communities of interest, sharing and improving upon ideas, and ultimately innovating in a collective manner—in real time. And modern crowdsourcing is gaining traction. It involves identifying a problem and putting out an open call to a group of people to solicit ideas, solutions, and innovations. The belief is that by combining expertise and creative thinking, the best solutions will ultimately emerge from collaborative effort.

People rarely come up with amazing ideas in an instant or by themselves. Innovative ideas usually take a lot of time to percolate. History is full of half ideas that only became powerful innovations after combining forces with other ideas. Stephen Johnson explores this concept in his insightful video on collective innovation.

Although crowdsourcing is a relatively new buzzword, the concept is hardly new. In fact, we can partially blame the industrial era for interrupting our natural tendency to collectively create. In his book Crowdsourcing, Jeff Howe goes on to explain that prior to the industrial age and the rise of mass production, the line between audience and creator was not as rigid. People met in parlor rooms and coffee houses to exchange and evolve innovative ideas. The decentralized Internet is helping us dismantle the boundaries we’ve been used to for multiple generations, bringing us back to an ancient tradition of shared storytelling.

At ILG, we’re most interested in what crowdsourcing has in store for the learning/training field. Crowdsourcing encourages sharing ideas in order to mine the most innovative solutions to learning challenges. It’s improving our ability to collaborate, making learning easier and more innovative than ever. We’re all pretty familiar with certain crowdsourced resources: wikipedia.com, stock photography sites like istockphoto.com, product and service review sites like Yelp.com and TripAdvisor.com all come to mind. Companies are developing new crowdsourcing tools that give users access to essential information when they need it.

Crowdsourcing is also gaining popularity with online training. Basic topics are established and then content is solicited from either a defined group or an open audience. The result is often an interactive learning experience based on the collection of content. The Faculty Project is one example, where professors from all over the world join together to create free online courses on a wide variety of topics using PowerPoint files, PDF documents, videos, and other supporting materials.

In his article for TrainingZone, Matt Pierce discusses the role of crowdsourcing in the flipped training content model, which gives learners access to training materials prior to the training session. He suggests crowdsourcing as a way to survey an organization’s workforce to find people with expertise in certain areas who can share their knowledge. Incentives and prizes for the most valuable contributions are built in.

How have you used crowdsourcing in your organization to build and share common knowledge?

A tidal wave of social learning is reshaping the way we experience new information. As businesses become more globalized, people are discovering more flexible, engaging ways to make connections with each other. We’re now able to cast a net into the ebbs and flows of relevant information that surrounds us. And the results are pretty amazing.

The Nature of Learning

Social learning builds a sense of community, creates standards or reference points, and offers alternative perspectives. It also generates support and encouragement within our networks.

The essence of social learning for businesses is that people collaborate and share to make sense of new ideas. In her excellent post on social learning on FastCompany.com, Marcia Connor sums it up this way: “Social learning combines social media tools with a shift in the corporate culture, a shift that encourages ongoing knowledge transfer and connects people in ways that make learning a joy.” New technologies are making it possible to create vibrant working environments that are “enthusiastically supported, where your sense of wonder returns and creativity blossoms — where people thrive.”

Children seem to learn through social interaction quite naturally. In days past, workers regularly learned by doing, by finding mentors and observing their behaviors. Our learning hasn’t always been bound by rigid org charts and corporate seminars.

Why has the business world taken such a siloed approach to learning for so long? The explosive potential for social media has helped us improve the way we learn at work, beyond the org chart. Perhaps social media tools are letting us tap back into something fundamental to learning: a sense of curiosity and exploration.

The Tools of Social Learning

If learning is a journey, then online social learning tools allow us to leave a trail of breadcrumbs—without geographical restrictions. Here are some common tools many of us already use every day to learn and share new information:

•  Wikipedia: A free content encyclopedia that anyone can edit, Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites in the world. It attracts more than 400 million visitors a month and a total of 1.2 million contributors. This is made possible by a software platform that simplifies collaboration.

• Twitter: People flock to twitter because it allows them to connect, communicate, share, and collaborate with people all over the world, as well as find the most current topics of interest. These topics can be organized using hash tags (#) for easy searchability.
• Company Blogs: External blogs let employees contribute posts and invite comments from visitors. They help build a company’s brand and allow a free-flowing exchange of new ideas.
• Internal Wikis: These sites let employees share knowledge within an organization, access common files like job descriptions, style guides, policies and procedures, and browse resources created by company subject matter experts.

 Social Learning Strategies at Work

Many of us are more than knee-deep in social media through sites like facebook, twitter, and pinterest. Then when we go to work, it’s as if we’re reverting back to how we used to communicate a decade ago. With email as the standard mode of communication at work, it’s difficult to openly communicate and collaborate on projects.

Embrace social learning or be left behind, says journalist Debra Donston-Miller. Users are tired of just searching for information online; now they want to network. It’s the next big step in social communication.

The opportunity for growth in the social business industry is vast. One company that has claimed a big stake in this space is Jive Software. The company’s enterprise-wide social platform leverages the social graph to offers people better ways to collaborate and communicate at work without having to resort to outdated modes of communication like email. Hundreds of big-name companies have adopted the technology with incredible results.

You don’t always need fancy tools for social learning to take place. For example, one of our clients needed a leadership program and a way for participants to practice applying their knowledge outside the classroom. We helped create a “lunch buddies” program to pair different individuals together for lunch following every training session over a nine-week period. They also participated in monthly cohort meetings as an opportunity to review and practice what they learned together.

Zappos.com is another company widely recognized for innovative uses of social strategies that support its customer service and culture. The company’s CEO says that he views social media use as more of a communication channel than a marketing channel. Zappos encourages positive and negative feedback exchanges from customers and employees to align with the core values of openness and honestly. The company offers twitter training to employees, and more than 400 have active accounts. They post YouTube videos and manage several corporate blogs focused on culture and customer service.

Professionals are also using social learning strategies to build their own personal learning networks (PLN) to keep up to date on topics of interest. Learning expert Jane Bozarth recommends using social networking to find people you want to know, participate in interesting conversations, and expand your usual horizons. By creating your own PLN, you can create your own professional brand and build a community of those who share—or even oppose—your interests.

One obvious downside to these abundant inlets for social learning is information overload. It’s something we’re all learning to manage as we juggle our many devices, online accounts. As we become more social online, we must develop stronger filters to weed through the distractions and irrelevant details.

Which social learning strategies do you use at work?