connected learning – Onlignment Archive

Telling Stories with Social Media – Part Three

In part two we looked at four ways in which we can use social media to enhance our storytelling. In this third and final part we’ll consider the key benefit and share a few tips.

Stories Sell

We may not always like to acknowledge this, but a lot of what we do as learning and development professionals is about selling. We sell the benefits of different ways of doing something, we sell the concept of a new process, we sell people tools and techniques that can make them more effective or efficient.
What any good salesman know is that it’s not enough to just tell someone about the features of a product or service. The emphasis has to be on the benefits it will bring to the individual (and it’s worth remembering that only the most dedicated of employees will be interested in the benefits it brings to the organisation more than the benefits it brings to him!).
One of the most effective ways of selling the benefits is to do so in the form of a story, and most importantly that story needs the right context.
There are many ways that social media can help us with this, but here are a few ideas.

We can use it to publish stories about the benefits that the training has brought to other people who have completed it. Better still, we can use social media as a vehicle for those people tell those stories themselves
We might ask people to use a hashtag to identify posts about this particular topic and then pull together all of them into one place.
We may select more active posters and invite them to blog regularly about their experiences, to tell the story of applying their learning in the workplace.

Tips

If you want to use stories more in your social media activities, here are a few tips.
The heart of a good story is often personal experience, so get into the habit of sharing your experiences, good and bad. Learning from your own mistakes is good, but learning from other’s mistakes is even better. By sharing your own bad experiences you can become that other person for your audience to learn from. This may require a shift in mindset; publicising our mistakes may not come naturally.
It’s not just about our own stories though. We may have no experience of a particular subject, or someone else’s experience may be more relevant or useful, so get into the habit of collecting stories. Write them in a notebook, store them on online or make audio recordings, do whatever works best for you but just make sure you keep them somewhere. Sometimes it’s a good idea to keep a note of who told the story, but unless they give their permission to be mentioned you should probably make the story anonymous.
If you feel comfortable doing so, make use of video. It’s an incredibly powerful medium that can make a really strong connection with your audience. For some people it’s actually much easier to record a video that tells a story than it is to write that story down. It doesn’t have to be slickly produced; most smartphones have a good enough video camera for recording online content.
As well as using it to record ideas when you hear them, you may want to use audio as a way to share your stories. Services like AudioBoo are a great way to record and share short snippets, and if you want to produce something longer maybe you could consider producing a regular podcast.
Go on, tell your story.

Telling Stories with Social Media – Part Two

In part one we considered why stories are so important to learning. Now we’ll look at four ways in which we can use social media to enhance our storytelling.

User Generated Context

We work in an industry that was, and in many cases still is, driven by the production and distribution of content. No surprise then that many of the early conversations about elearning included the phrase ‘content is king’. Along with the rise of social media tools came another phrase, ‘user generated content’, and there was much talk of how they enabled anyone to produce their own content. This is true, but social media also opens up other possibilities.
Using storytelling as a technique for training is not new, but social media allows us to do so in new and interesting ways. We can go beyond just delivering stories, and invite our learners to become part of them. We can move away from a scenario in which the trainer tells the story and learner receives it, to one in which they work together to co-author an evolving story.
The learner’s ideas can extend, enhance and improve the original story. Most importantly, they can give it the right context. In previous roles as a training manager, one of the more common issues with training was when learners didn’t recognise the situation or the people in it, and therefore don’t connect with it. By giving our learners the opportunity to become part of how the story develops, they are able to make it more useful to themselves and to others, by adapting it to fit their context.

The Making Of…

Something that we don’t often do, is give our learners an insight into the story behind the learning; how and why a course or programme was created, why we chose certain topics and techniques and so on. Social media gives us an opportunity to give our people an insight into that process. You can use tools like Twitter to provide regular snippets of information about the programme, blogs to provide more in depth updates and features and videos of key people involved in the programme.
It doesn’t have to stop once the programme is running. More and more programmes are using social media to connect the learners with each other, but what about taking the opportunity to connect them with people not on the programme? You only have to look at the rise of reality TV to know that people have an interest in what other people are doing. We can give our learners the chance to share their story as it happens.
Imagine a manager getting her team involved and engaged with her own development by providing them with regular updates about what she’s doing. They are already part of her development, whether they know it or not. This approach invites them to take an active part in the story.

Engagement and Support

The history, and future, of your organisation is nothing but a sequence of stories. Some of those stories are positive (successful new product launches, new premises, big sales increases) and others less so (downsizing, closures, drops in the share price) but they all contribute to the wider story of what makes your organisation what it is. Of course, you can’t really have a story unless something is happening, and if something is happening that usually means change, and we all know that can be a difficult thing to manage.
The trouble is that we often forget that our employees are all part of the story, and we use staff magazines and intranet pages to tell them that story as if it was happening to someone else. If you want to check whether this is what happens in your organisation, just listen to people talking and see if they refer to the organisation by its name or as ‘we’. If it’s the former, you may have a problem.
What we can do is use social media to build a framework around the story and give people the opportunity to get involved, by encouraging feedback and discussion. The key is to stop thinking about your staff as an audience, and instead to treat them as collaborators.

The Two Screens Approach

You may have heard the term backchannel, usually in relation to conferences and perhaps live online events such as webinars. In essence this involves the audience using social media tools to interact with each other, with others who aren’t physically present and occasionally with the presenter themselves.
This is something that has become quite common in many areas, and a broad social media backchannel has existed around traditional media such as TV and movies for some time. Until recently this has been driven by consumers themselves and by dedicated sites such as GetGlue and Miso. It is becoming more common to see content producers embracing what is referred to as ‘two screen viewing’, in which additional content is made available on your smartphone or tablet at the same time as you watch the programme on TV. It isn’t just about content though, with services such as Zeebox adding a social layer to TV by pulling in Tweets and other social content related to what we watch.
No matter what its format, we need to start designing our learning with the backchannel in mind. The backchannel is the place where the learners can become fans who will go on to tell their own stories and in doing so promote the learning to others.
In part three we’ll share a few storytelling tips.

Telling Stories with Social Media – Part One

As human beings, we’re natural storytellers. Outside of the confines of academic and scientific discussion, much of our communication is done in the form of stories. When we talk about our weekends, what happened to us at work today, a great day out we had or a sporting event we attended, we do so as stories.
When a significant event happens in our lives – a child is born, we get married, a friend or relative dies, we get a new job – we don’t tell people about it by just reporting the facts. We tell stories about it; how it happened, how we felt, how people reacted, where we were.
It’s how we make sense of things, and that’s as true of conversations in the workplace as it is of those that take place outside.
In fact, the idea for this post came out of a conversation with some collaborators on a recent project during which we talked about our experience of conferences and similar events. We all agreed that we learned something from presentations about theoretical subjects, learned a bit more from case studies, but gained the most from the conversations with other delegates in the breaks.
We asked ourselves why this might be the case? The conclusion we reached was that the break time conversations are more likely to be in the form of stories. In those stories we share our own experiences, both good and bad, and in doing so we take the theoretical and make it more real. We also agreed that the most memorable presentations we saw were the ones that were story based, or at least had a storytelling element to them.
Stories also provide a form of learning that is safe and risk free. One example we discussed was surgeons, who can learn much about routine operations from typical theory and practice, but often learn about more advanced techniques from the stories told by other surgeons.
Just to prove that you can’t get away from storytelling, the previous three paragraphs are just that; a story about a conversation I had.
Social Media and Storytelling
When we talk about connected learning, we often start by saying that it’s nothing new; that in fact it’s just the application of technology to the things that we’ve always done. We may have replaced the coffee machine conversations with Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. Indeed, we might have moved much of the in person social interaction online, and in doing so opened up those conversations to much wider groups of people. What hasn’t changed is that at the heart of each and every one of those conversations is a story.
What social media does is open up new possibilities for how those stories are developed, shared and adapted. In part two we’ll explore some of those possibilities.
In part two we’ll look at four ways in which we can use social media to enhance our storytelling.

What’s Yours Is Mine – Copyright in the age of Social Media – Part Two

In part one we looked at the shift to sharing content and the potential challenges that may present to L&D.

Part 2 – Copyright and IP

Let’s just pause for a moment to consider what copyright and intellectual property are, because they’re both terms that are used frequently without being fully understood.

Intellectual property (IP) refers to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognised. Under intellectual property law, owners are granted certain exclusive rights to a variety of intangible assets, such as musical, literary, and artistic works; discoveries and inventions; and words, phrases, symbols, and designs. Common types of intellectual property rights include copyrights, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights and trade secrets in some jurisdictions.
Copyright – a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time. It gives the copyright holder the right to be credited for the work, to determine who may adapt the work to other forms, who may perform the work, who may financially benefit from it, and other, related rights. It is an intellectual property form (like the patent, the trademark, and the trade secret) applicable to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete.
The contemporary intent of copyright is to promote the creation of new works by giving authors control of and profit from them. Some jurisdictions require works to be registered to establish copyright, but most recognise copyright in any completed work, without formal registration.
Original source: Wikipedia

In short, the creator of a work is usually the copyright holder and in the UK and US a work is the copyright of its creator as soon as it is created, without any requirement to register it or to explicitly claim copyright, such as by adding a copyright symbol. That’s not say that it isn’t good practice to be clear when content is copyrighted and who the copyright holder is. Of course this situation is effected by legal arrangements, so you may want to check any contracts of employment or other agreements to find out whether the IP that you create as part of your work belongs to you or your employer.

Alternative Licensing Models

So if we accept that all of the content we produce is our own IP, and that for most of us in L&D that IP either directly or indirectly provides our income, how should we address the issue of sharing? How do we protect our IP when there’s a universal shift to sharing content.
We could certainly take a stance in which we fully enforce all of the rights granted to us through copyright,
aggressively pursue anyone who breaches them, and limiting the access and use of our content. This is a perfectly legitimate and understandable approach; after all if we’ve worked hard to produce something we should be rewarded for it. Most of us use this approach by default, perhaps because it’s the only one we know.
In some cases this approach may be quite straightforward. If you produce a piece of elearning content and then licence it to be used within a company, the technical constraints around hosting or delivery should make it easy to control. On the other hand, if you run a training course during which you give the attendees handouts, how do you stop them being circulated amongst their colleagues when they return to work?
If your content is online, or in any digital format, potentially it becomes much harder to manage.
One option is to consider an alternative licensing model, in which we retain our IP but at the same time make it possible for people to share it. There are a number of licences that allow us to do this, but probably the best known and most widely used is Creative Commons.
What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons (CC) provides a set of free licences that offer a more flexible approach to copyright than the usual “all rights reserved” method. Instead they allow you to take a “some rights reserved” approach, meaning you as the creator of the work can decide which rights you will grant to the end user.
There are four key aspects to a CC licence:
Attribution – Every CC licence requires attribution, meaning that when CC licensed content is used the original creator must be acknowledged, in effect saying “I created this, give me credit for the work I did”.
Commercial Use or Not – In allowing other people to reuse your work, you can choose whether it can be used for any purpose or only for non-commercial activities.
Derivative Works – You can also choose whether people are only able to use your work in its original unaltered form, or if they can create derivative works based upon it.
Share Alike – If you do allow people to make something based on your work, you can also choose whether they must offer it on the same terms (i.e. a Creative Commons or compatible licence)?
As well as the many independent content creators using CC licences, there are some big names you will undoubtedly be familiar with, including Wikipedia, the White House and Al Jazeera. CC also provides the legal framework for the Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative under which some educational institutions are making their courseware freely available.

Potential Benefits

We’ve already established that our IP has value to us, so why would we want to give away some of the rights to it? If we are going to give up some rights we needs to offset that against the good it may do us, and beyond simple altruistic reasons, there are quite a few potential benefits.

It clarifies the copyright position of the content, offering a clear set of licence terms instead of relying on implied licence terms such as fair use or fair dealing.
It encourages and legitimises the sharing of content, without hiding the source. If we think back to our earlier example of workshop handouts, there is a good chance that the delegates will share them anyway. By explicitly granting permission to share them we would remove any motivation to hide their origin, thus allowing our name or brand to be associated with the resources as it spreads through the organisation.
Services such as Youtube, Flickr, and Picasa integrate Creative Commons search, as do search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This can be beneficial to anyone creating content where it’s hard to find original resources, such as photos on niche topics that you wouldn’t find in a typical stock image library. It’s beneficial to the creators of that content too, because it helps to ensure attribution.
Taking a pragmatic view, it also saves the time, effort and cost of chasing anyone who infringes your copyright. As an individual this would be very difficult to do, and even for organisations it can be a time consuming and costly process with no guarantee of success.

The ease with which such licences allow people to legally share your works is a significant benefit. The trend for sharing and the increase in online content places ever greater importance on our networks, the people in them and the content that flows through them. Anything that ensures we keep the credit for our work as it moves through these networks can only be a benefit.

Conclusion: To share or not?

Thriving in a networked world means using every available tool to spread our content and our reputation. Choosing to licence our work in a way that encourages sharing has the potential to give us visibility far beyond the reach of regular marketing channels. That’s not to say that everything we do needs to be licensed this way, but we should be open to forms of IP protection that are fit for purpose in a network economy.
As an example of the simple practical benefits of CC licensing, in this article I’ve used and remixed content from Wikipedia and the Creative Commons website, safe in the knowledge that I’m within the law.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License too, so you are free to share and remix it yourself if you wish.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Note: It probably goes without saying, but this post isn’t legal advice and you shouldn’t make any big decisions about your intellectual property without consulting a suitably qualified professional.

What’s Yours Is Mine – Copyright in the age of Social Media – Part One

Part 1 – The Shift to Sharing

If there is one concept that sums up the way we use the internet today it, would be “sharing”. We share interesting articles and blog posts that we find. We use services like Foursquare to share our location and activity. We post our presentations on Slideshare, our videos on YouTube, our photos on Flickr. We share reviews on everything from book purchases to holidays. Some of this we do from our desktops, but ever more commonly we’re instantly sharing content from the same mobile device on which it was just created, irrespective of location.
Our online world is expanding at a rate that’s hard to grasp. There was more data transmitted across the internet in 2010 than in all the previous years combined. According to Intel, the number of internet connected devices is expected to grow from an already staggering 4 billion today, to 15 billion in 2015 and 50 billion in 2020.
Nearly everywhere we go on the internet, content publishers are actively encouraging us to spread the word. They add buttons that make it a one click activity for us to share their content with our own social graph; utilising our relationships with other individuals to promote their product.
There is also the human element to consider. I don’t subscribe to ideas that divide the population into digital natives and digital immigrants, but we have to recognise that the people currently reaching adulthood are younger than the web. They don’t remember a time when sharing content was harder than tapping a button.
So we can be pretty sure that the amount of content will grow, and the sharing will continue.

What Does That Mean to L&D?

So what does that mean to those of us in the world of learning, development and training? Potentially, quite a lot. Much of the L&D industry is based on the sale of intellectual property (IP), whether that’s content or advice. No wonder then, that so many people in our industry work so hard to extract as much value as possible by controlling their IP.
Not everybody is effected in the same way, but if you’ve built a business model based on the sale of training materials, this shift to a culture of sharing is a real challenge. Let me give you an example.
I recently spent time with a group of people from some of the biggest software vendors on the planet, and they were responsible for the sale and delivery of training to the users of their products. Anyone that’s worked in a large organisation will be familiar with their model; they supply their software at very low cost, sometimes at no cost at all, and the bulk of their revenue comes from selling a range of related services (which of course includes training).
The trouble is that their clients are creating and sharing their own learning content. They’re not producing courses, they’re mostly creating practical “how to” material in all sorts of formats from short videos, to blog posts to pdf documents, and they’re not just using it internally, it’s being shared on the internet too. You only have to do a quick search on YouTube or any other video hosting site to find examples of this.
You may not be effected to the same extent, but if you’re in the learning or training business, you will have some form of IP that you need to manage; consultants sell their expertise, training providers and elearning vendors sell course content, product vendors sell supporting materials. Even internal L&D departments are likely to produce content in which they own the IP.
In part two we will consider intellectual property, copyright and alternative licensing models.