Tag Archives: Twitter
I Don’t Care What You Had For Lunch: Finding Professional Value in Twitter

I Don’t Care What You Had For Lunch: Finding Professional Value in Twitter

by on July 5, 2011 in Social Media

Here at Dashe & Thomson, we made a New Year’s resolution for 2011 to dig a little deeper into social media and explore how to use it for social and informal learning, increasing website traffic, and building networks. Of course, Twitter was on the list of tools we were nudged to start using on a regular basis.

I have to say, I met this announcement with an inward groan. In my mind, at the time, I considered Twitter to be for celebrities to keep fans up to date with their most recent apologies (who cares?) and other sad folks who felt the need to broadcast their lunch menu to the world (double who cares?). Not for me, I thought. I am generally an introvert and not prone to fits of opinion sharing without being asked. I was NOT excited about this.

On the other hand, I was willing to give it a …

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Why Companies Should Spend More on Social Learning

Why Companies Should Spend More on Social Learning

by on May 5, 2011 in blended learning, Informal Learning, social learning

Companies are spending next to nothing on social learning, and their frugality is going to come back to haunt them.  Like many enterprise learning companies, we are actively brainstorming ways to incorporate collaborative Web 2.0 technologies into our training programs, but rarely do we find a client that wants to create a robust learning environment comprised of both formal and informal components.

Last week I had a phone conversation with Ian Huckabee of WeeJee Media.  It sounds like Weejee is growing quickly with Ian and Tracy at the helm, but they too are frustrated with the slow adoption of informal learning.  Wikis are an easy place to start the promotion of collaborative learning spaces, and clients seem to be willing and able to accept this informal tool into their everyday lives.  However, wikis are only the tip of the iceberg.  Cammy Bean’s latest blog post provides many ideas as …

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Analyzing the ROI of Social Media in Training

Analyzing the ROI of Social Media in Training

by on May 3, 2011 in social learning

A continuing theme among my blog posts has been the difficulty of demonstrating the ROI of social learning initiatives.  We know that they work, our clients find that they work, but there’s not always a lot of hard evidence out there going in to a project. 

In no realm has this been more evident than in our constant encouragement of the use of internal social media networks as a crucial benefit-multiplier for any employee training project.  As has been noted in a number of posts here on the Social Learning Blog, including “Collaborative Learning Lessons from Wikipedia (and Small Insects)” and “The $2 Whiteboard Shows Power of Peer-to-Peer Learning”, while a core curriculum of base training material is essential to spark the learning process when new technology or processes are being implemented, it is when people begin talking that the really handy learning begins.  We frequently …

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Who’s Building the Social Learning Roads?

Who’s Building the Social Learning Roads?

by on April 20, 2011 in Classroom Learning, Informal Learning, social learning

Over the last few months I’ve discussed with my brother, a professor at Bethel University here in Minneapolis, how to incorporate social media into his classes.  Without throwing him completely under the bus, I’ll describe him as being late to the social media party but definitely ahead of the curve when it comes to openness to using informal learning elements like social media in his undergraduate courses.

Most of the time we end up brainstorming ways to incorporate tools like Twitter or Facebook into his lessons, because even though I may have more experience using social media, the tools are so new that no one really knows the best way to utilize them, for anything really.  Companies like Hubspot (love them, by the way) that market themselves as “social media” or “inbound marketing” experts do have some great ideas on how to leverage social tools to increase traffic, sales leads, …

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Twitter as Social Learning: Seven Ways to Facilitate the Exchange of Information

Twitter as Social Learning: Seven Ways to Facilitate the Exchange of Information

by on March 14, 2011 in social learning

Most of us in the adult learning industry have already found and incorporated Twitter into our everyday lives.  Where Facebook and LinkedIn serve mainly as social dashboards for our personal and professional networks, respectively, I see Twitter as a customized information portal.  For those of you that use web-based aggregators like Google Reader but have not yet made room for Tweets, Twitter is an aggregator on steroids.  Instead of waiting for your favorite journalist to write a thousand-word essay on Charlie Sheen’s shenanigans from the day before, you can hear directly from Mr. Sheen himself, the second he wants to speak.

Twitter gets a bad rap.  From its childish name to its complex language of re-tweets and hashtags, many people tend to criticize the application before they try it.  Since I became an active Twitter user a few months ago, the application has grown on me to the point …

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