In Learning and Networking With Blogs
By Tony Karrer

Blogs are emerging as powerful learning and networking tools. Most people have heard the terms “blog” and “blogger,” but often, they associate them with a stereotype perpetuated by the media that portrays them as unreliable, rogue sources of information. The reality is that blogging is a significant learning and social networking tool that can help individuals, groups, and organizations learn in new, interesting ways.

Most people begin blogging by signing up to an RSS Reader and subscribing to various blogs. Commonly used RSS Readers are Bloglines and Google Reader. RSS stands for “really simple syndication,” a simple concept that has important implications. An RSS feed is a list of recent changes. For example, you can get an RSS feed from CNN that will contain the latest news stories that have been posted to the site. Blogs always provide an RSS feed that contains posts that have recently been created. Typically you can subscribe to a feed by clicking on an XML icon or a link that says “subscribe.”

The wonderful aspect of using an RSS Reader is that it shows new content from all feeds since the last time the user viewed them. This means that the user never needs to visit CNN, a blog, or any other of these sources to find out what’s new; he can just open the reader. This makes RSS a powerful tool to control information flow.

Affect of writing a blog
Jay Cross, CEO of Internet Time Group and author of Informal Learning, likens writing a blog to having a camera in hand. It puts the world in a new perspective. Everything that the user encounters becomes a potential picture or in the case of a blog, a potential post.

Bloggers continually search for “interesting information” they can post on their blogs. When they write a post, they must synthesize the information, formulate additional questions, contrast and make sense of differing view points, and identify patterns and trends. Karyn Romeis, a learning solutions designer at Capita, a British professional services company, has been blogging for two years and finds that she gets tremendous value from it. “I’ve learned more from blogging in the past year than I learned in several years using other approaches,” she says.

Tracy Hamilton, an education assistant at a regional health center who started as the result of a conference a few months ago, has a similar perspective. “Blogging is my main and most important source of learning.”

This kind of effect is important in today’s world. As Thomas Friedman states in his book The World is Flat, “The most important skill in the 21st century is to learn how to learn.” Bloggers consistently say that writing a blog is a great learning vehicle.

The public nature of a blog raises the stakes because blogging resembles having to do a presentation at a meeting or teaching in a classroom. In fact, many of the attributes of preparing and giving a classroom presentation apply to blogging.

Blogging also creates new ways to interact. Each time a blogger leaves a comment or links to another writer’s post, the two are having a conversation. Over time, as the conversations continue, the bloggers develop a deeper relationship. This is similar to content-based social networking that occurs in del.icio.us and Flickr, but blogging is based on a more open, fluid type of content and conversations. Using emerging tools such as MyBlogLog, bloggers can get to know who is visiting their blogs and who is in their community.

Once bloggers become connected, they often reach out to get help on a particular topic. Karyn Romeis says, “It is amazing how unselfish bloggers are with what they know. Social networking has blurred the boundaries between work, play, and learning, between corporate and academic and between formal and informal.”

Many workplace learning and performance (WLP) professionals find that building this network and having this sustained discussion allow them to discuss significant issues they face at their work in a way that’s not easy to duplicate in face-to-face interaction. Wendy Wickham, a medical applications trainer at George Washington University and a blogger since 2006, started her blog because of several important projects, including an LMS implementation and some application upgrades.

It takes time to build up a social network using a blog. As Tracy Hamilton describes it, “You have to work at communicating with other people, asking questions, and responding to questions, but it’s very much worth the effort. The one thing I have really noticed and experienced about the blogging community is that everyone is extremely friendly, open, and willing to share ideas and be mentors to one another.”

The process of connecting can be sped up by posting interesting questions, linking to other blogger’s posts, or participating in activities such as the Learning Circuit Blog’s Big Question.

Implications for groups and organizations
WLP professionals should consider adopting blogging as a personal learning practice. Blogs can also be used to share information between knowledge workers within a team or across an organization.

Work teams can use blogs as a means to collaborate on research tasks. For example, a work team might want to evaluate different e-learning authoring tools before adopting them. As team members find interesting information, as thinking evolves and questions emerge, they can post them on their blogs. Most work teams currently use email for this purpose, but email trails are hard to follow, especially over a long period of time. Work teams can make their blogs internal only or public so that dialog can occur with interested third parties.

Both IBM and Motorola have adopted blogging as an organizational tool. In both companies, thousands of employees write blogs. Some of them are used by workgroups who find them helpful for information discovery, dissemination, and evaluation. Blogs are a wonderful way to capture lessons learned. As individual workers encounter particular issues, they can capture them in blogs, which become an invaluable resource. Blogs also promote a culture of productive disagreement, discourse, and problem resolution.

As an organization expands its number of blogs, it helps build social networks around particular topics inside the organization. That means that employees within the organization will identify, become connected, and build relationships over time with others who share common interests.

Role of WLP professionals
Because blogging is a bottom-up activity driven by individuals, it presents a challenging question to workplace learning professionals: How can they support it? Most experts agree that generally mandated blogging doesn’t work. In fact, this is often called “flogging”—forced blogging.

However, there are a few things you can do to encourage blogging in your organization:

* provide easy access to blogging tools
* provide links to information on blogs, blogging models, and best practices
* develop a blogging policy for the organization
* use blogs as an integrated part of courses
* create a blog on blogging and individual work and learning solutions
* create a support system for bloggers in your organization.

The starting point for most WLP professionals is to learn about the use of blogs as individual work and learning tools and then become evangelists about these technologies, methods, and habits. Their audiences generally are involved in tacit work that involves researching alternatives, evaluating options, and making decisions. Many different jobs functions, including workplace learning, involve this kind of work.

While a new set of skills and habits is required to make blogging effective for individuals, workgroups, and organizations, a blog can be an important tool in workplace learning and development.

Brent Schlenker, a well-known blogger and frequent speaker at information technology events, summarizes why blogging can benefit workplace learning professionals. “If for no other reason than your job is changing, and you might want to be engaged in the process of what your new job will include.”

Reprinted from Learning Circuits