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Teaching Social Collaboration in Corporate Spaces


This week I read an excerpt from Dr. Dennen’s manuscript in progress on Instructional Design and Development for Social Media. As I stated in a previous blog post, in my corporate learning environment, we don’t use the Big 6 Social Media giants. However, we do use a social collaboration tool, mainly as performance support post a classroom training event, so this chapter was meaningful to me.

One of the challenges in corporate environments revolves around a common belief that “if we build it, they will come.” Unfortunately, this isn’t always true and online initiatives that are often seen as ‘fun and engaging’ fall flat with relatively little to no participation from the audiences they are supposed to engage. After reading this chapter, I was able to see how I could correct some of the flawed thinking in my approach to engaging with my online corporate community.

While I won’t be able to use direct quotes from Dennen’s manuscript in progress, I will cover a general theme that could be of value. We assume that in the age of social media, that learners automatically now how to interact in a corporate online community. But, we should not assume this. Dennen’s work proclaims that we should provide directions and examples. I have seen this approach implemented in my online graduate course on Social Media. In order to gain familiarity with a social media tool, the instructor provides explicit tasks that we should perform. I can attest that having a specific task to accomplish has lessened the anxiety that I have around using a social media tool.

This approach could definitely be used in a corporate environment. For instance, for a women’s leadership community Chatter group, I could ask participants to perform a specific task, such as share links to their favorite leadership blogs or websites. Then, I could post a video which shows the participants how to perform this task and post a few examples on the site. The key, I am learning, is to provide as much support as possible for the participants. Using Social media in our personal life may not be new but using social media for learning in a workplace setting is a new concept. Thus, we should teach participants just like we would teach them how to learn any new task or skill.

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