It has been my experience that social media use in a professional context is very different than an educational context. Professionally, social media is used to network and develop business relationships. It is often also used to market a company or forward a brand. Educationally, social media is used to encourage collaboration, build digital literacy, and aid in knowledge management (Bates, 2014). The challenge I see in Professional Development is balancing professional and educational uses of social media. By that I mean, our learners would not want their professional social media feeds littered with educational content, yet they would likely enjoy using social media in our professional development programs. Realistically, I think learners would have to develop separate social media accounts for educational purposes (i.e. separate from their personal accounts/business accounts). We also have a social media policy which dictates what we are allowed to publically share and post related to the firm – making social media use a bit more complicated.
All that aside, I think social media would be a great tool to encourage learning and collaboration outside the formal classroom setting. Discussion forums or Twitter hashtags could help us keep our learners engaged and continue the conversation after a program ends. We are always encouraging our learners to take ownership of their professional development. I think incorporating social media would further this goal because learners would have to actively participate and drive course content. We have talked about creating an internally hosted learning blog. Perhaps we could encourage people to post on the blog as part of our live seminars (maybe even create our own tagging system).
I think social media integration must be considered when designing a program. You have to look at your program goals, content, and target audience and ask yourself, will this be beneficial? If the answer is yes, you should design the session with your social media strategy in mind. I don’t think that necessarily mean re-designing around social media but it must be thoughtfully incorporated – you cannot simply add it as an afterthought.
References
Bates, T. (2014). Pedagogical differences between media: Social media. In Teaching in digital age, Chapter 7. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/9-5-5-social-media/
Hi Colleen,
That is a very interesting point you made about the professional context being different than the educational content. And in retrospect I noticed that many of the courses I took that involve social media, none of them used LinkedIn. I did connect with some people in my classes, but overall Linked In remains in the professional/non-educational realm. (I am not referring to sharing of professional development LinkedIn articles as educational, though they maybe.) It seems that Twitter sits on the edge of professional and being just social, so that seems to be used more often in the course I took. In fact, I created my Twitter account for a publishing course I took, and I use it more professionally since. There is a difference in what I would post in Facebook vs Twitter and Linked In. I think that is part of digital literacy. And even the inclusion or absence of these tools in a learning context indirectly provides information on their uses.
Hi Parmdip
I agree. Some social media tools seem to lend themselves more to professional versus social versus educational use. I think tools like Twitter can be used for all three. It is just a matter of if you want 1 account to host all three. I personally would not want to tweet a picture or funny video on the same account I tweet about business matters.