Jay Cross of the Internet Time Blog makes the following three points:

• According to the Institute for Research on Learning, at most, formal training only accounts for 20 percent of how people learn their jobs. Most workers learn their jobs from observing others, asking questions, trial and error, calling the help desk and other unscheduled, largely independent activities.
• According to Robert Brinkerhoff and Stephen Gill, people who do attend formal training never apply 80 to 90 percent of what they learn back on the job. They forget the bulk of what they are exposed to in a matter of days,
• Free-range learning entails workers taking part in meaningful conversations, listening to and telling stories, building personal trust networks that yield advice quickly and learning things in small chunks as needed.

What do observations such as these mean for those of us engaged with preparing our students for life, leisure, and livelihood in the 21st century? It means that non-formal, ‘free-range’ learning will become an expected competence at the workplace and we therefore need to create opportunities for students to learn to harness the power and wisdom of the online community!

We need to help students to develop and hone their skills in the following:

• initiating participation,
• establishing presence,
• gaining membership,
• building a personal network,
• establishing trust that will yield information and advice speedily, and
• piecing together, making sense of, and evaluating all of the information.

We have been encouraging our colleagues at Ngee Ann Polytechnic to consider utilising Internet Messaging and Microblogging for educational purposes.

Internet Messaging (IM)

In my travels across Asia, I observe more and more people using Microsoft’s Messenger(MSN) and other chat programs at work. The knowledge that their friends and colleagues are online comforts them as they can ask any questions and look for suggestions. Companies in emerging economies such as China, India and Vietnam do not have in-house staff-training facilities. Wherever training is available, the freshness of the content is a victim of the fast changing environment.

The fresh employee is oftentimes left to her own devices to learn her job. The internet is one of the first places she turns to. Having access to a personal computer in an office in China is a given in most cases. The companies are not so strict about what kind of programs one installs on their PCs. A lot of these companies rely on the internet for communication and market research. The employees are also encouraged to go online and search for information.

Always on, an airport employee in China online with contacts.

The new employee figures out forums where she can pose questions and blogs she can search through. She will quickly add the people she has spotted on these forums and blogs as her contacts on her IM. If she has a question, she might ask the individual IM contact.

If she does not want to disturb the user or she is not sure who to address the question to, she will make use of a trick. She will change her IM status message to show the question. This way all her IM contacts see her question next to her name on their IM windows. If they know the answer, they will reply to her. This is a non-intrusive way to getting answers that is gaining popularity in the IM environment.

IM id on business cards

It is acceptable now for people to have their IM usernames displayed on their business cards. For some time now, I have been tracking my IM communications with my friends. I find that I frequently get asked questions.

Getting answers on MSN

The image above shows a friend in Thailand asking me to recommend a camera.

If I had posted the rest of the transcript, it would have shown that most of the talk is trivial but in effect what my contacts are doing is building social capital that enables them to ask technical questions later on.

Most of this behavior is unconscious and is just a continuation of their online usage pattern from their college days. It becomes an inherent behavior and it seems natural to do so. If you look at what we do in the offline world, our behavior is not too different. We build professional contacts at a seminar or party and try to keep in touch with them.

IM as a Learning Tool

As we noted in the previous paragraph, IM tools enable the user to create a virtual knowledge network. Once you have added some contacts on your IM network, it is easy to ask questions.

Teachers can also create group chats for project groups. IM and conferencing tools such as Skype now support audio and video chat too. You could bring in an expert from abroad into your class via IM.

As an example, the Singapore Korean Meetup Group conducts some of their language lessons online via IM. IM tools also serve as a quick way of transferring files between computers in a classroom.

Microblogging

While people have been using IM tools for almost a decade, these days we are hearing more about Twitter. Twitter was launched in 2006 as a micro blogging platform. Earlier we saw how IM users use their status messages to ask questions and inform their friends what they are upto. Twitter is a platform where people can post such status messages. The posts are known as “tweets”, and they are limited to 140 characters.

Every Twitter user has a username and their tweets are displayed at http://www.twitter.com/. For example, my username is preetamrai and you can see my twitter page at http://www.twitter.com/preetamrai.

The tweets appear in reverse-chronological order.

My tweets could be

1. Mood messages or status updates, or example: “Hungry now, near Bukit Timah”.
2. Observations: “There is a new Air Asia budget flight to Bandung.”
3. Links to an interesting find on the internet: “Jacky has great collection of Chinese e-learning sites at http://bit.ly/ipnrm”
4. A question or a request for a suggestion: “A friend wants to hire a web designer in Singapore with CSS + Flash skills. Any recommendations?”

If you find my tweets insightful, you might decide to follow me. That ways you can read my updates. There is no obligation to reply to any of my messages unless you have something to say. Another reason why Twitter is attracting more members is that it is very easy to use on mobile phones.

A popular trend these days is to create a hashtag for an event or topic. Car owners in Bangkok post twitter messages on the traffic conditions and add the tag #bkktraffic. I can track this particular tag in realtime to get status updates on the traffic condition. If I come across a roadblock, I can also launch the Twitter application on my phone and post a message “Road repairs near Sukumwit soi 22 #bkktraffic”. People following this tag will all see my update and avoid that particular area.

Twitter as a learning tool

The value of a Twitter network is in the people you decide to follow. I tend to seek out people who are working in a similar area to mine and people working on interesting projects. They constantly explore new ideas and tools and keep tweeting about their observations. This way I keep myself informed of the new developments.

Twitter network as a knowledge network

Your Twitter network acts as a sounding board and you can often ask questions and get it answered. In the image above, you see Twitter user NTT – one of the people I am following – ask a question about a particular software. I was reading my messages, I knew the answer and I responded. This feature becomes even more powerful when you bring location based phones such as an iPhone to the mix. There are times when I am in a new city and I want to get some information. Most mobile Twitter clients have a “Nearby” feature that lets you see Twitter feeds of users within a specified radius from where you are. You can post your questions and chances are that one of the Twitter user nearby will provide you with the answer.

How can a lecturer use twitter?

• Get your students to follow your twitter broadcasts. These tweets can be links to references
• follow twitter feeds of a notable industry figure and
• retweet points of interest to your community
• Track keywords relating to current events. You can use the Monitter service to do this.
• Twitter about your or students projects. This might encourage further comments and conversations.

Tapping on online Communities

Tapping the potential of online communities is an e-competency that would serve students well as they move into the world of work and life. They should graduate not just knowing how to IM or tweet, but having highly developed skills to initiate participation, build trust networks, and know how to make these networks work for them. As educators, we will need therefore to be aware of the tools and their potential. More critically, we will need to know how to purposefully weave these tools into our learning activities to develop student e-competence.

At the Teaching and Learning Centre, we offer training sessions on MSN, Skype, and Twitter sessions for lecturers interested in these technologies. The sessions includes topics such as creating a Twitter account, installing MS Messenger, Skype client software, adding friends and students, conducting group chats, and ideas on how to purposefully infuse these tools into learning activities.

Author

By Preetam Rai, technology trainer at Teaching and Learning Centre, Ngee Ann Polytechnic.