Etienne’s work on social learning theory places learning at the core of human existence and assumes that it is fundamentally a social phenomenon. Learning is the foundation of who we are (becoming). It is social because our human nature is social, not just because (or when) we interact with others or use certain tools.

We are aware of the current trend to focus conversations about social learning on social media. We understand this trend because, indeed, emerging social media technologies are surprisingly aligned with the tenets of social learning theory. We believe that this is precisely why they constitute such an important trend. But it is the social nature of human learning that makes these tools so relevant today, and potentially transformative, not the tools that make human learning suddenly social.

We want to promote this broader view of social learning and base our work on it, whether it is theoretical work on social learning capability or practical work with organizations, governments, and international development projects. All these areas can benefit from taking a deeply social view of learning.

While social learning has never been about social media, we agree that a theory and practice of social learning today certainly can’t ignore these emerging technologies. They open countless new avenues for the social nature of human learning to manifest and in some cases, expand.

Even so, we want our work on social learning to explore this social nature in its essence, while seeing social media as a recent phenomenon to be explored and leveraged. What makes all this exciting is the convergence of multiple trends: the increasing acceptance of social learning theory, the explosion of social media, the rise of social networks, the need to anchor organizational strategies, public policy, and developmental imperatives in a social understanding of learning, and the globalization of learning challenges.

Technology has always been relevant to communities to help members connect across time and space and share relevant resources. Web 2.0 technologies are often associated with new, more “horizontal” ways to connect and share information, networked thinking, and new forms of representation—all uses of technology that are very much aligned with the peer-to-peer learning typical of communities of practice. There are many different tools and for each tool, many different realizations; and there is also a great variety in the ways people and communities use these tools. Yet practically, it is useful to review briefly the potential that these new technologies hold for the learning of communities of practice.

However, the use of these technologies brings up all sorts of delicate community issues. Who has the right to read, edit, or administer a wiki? Who is an author on a blog? How do members keep track of where relevant events are happening and relevant things are stored? Will a collective resource become incomprehensible without some level of coordination? How do members manage the mix of private and public spaces? The new tools emphasize user control and self-organization, but their effective use by communities often entails more coordinating work and development of shared practices than one would expect. Finally, the number of offerings of new and different types of technologies grows so quickly that at least some community members need to act as “technology stewards” staying updated on behalf of the community to spot the best tools to support the community activities without overwhelming the members.

Avatar-based web worlds (e.g., Second Life). Some communities have meeting areas on avatar-based sites. It allows them to have more of a sense of shared space even when they cannot be together in physical space. For instance, the ability to see who is there, even as an avatar, can help members get a more concrete sense of community togetherness than in a teleconference call. The full potential of these types of sites has yet to be fully explored.

Some communities open accounts on media-sharing sites, such as Flickr for sharing photos, so that members can share photos, videos, and maps. This provides a simple way to document community events or to collect resources relevant to members. In other communities members use their own individual accounts and a common tag to share memories or resources. Sharing through a common tag means that individuals can share their photos, videos etc. across multiple communities.

Networking websites, such as Facebook, Linked-In, or Google+, offer quick, simple, and cheap ways for communities to open spaces for interaction. While the sites may not offer all the features that communities of practice need, they present the advantage of being located where people already have accounts, profiles, and personal networks.

Micro-blogging, using a tool such as Twitter or Yammer, has become a very popular way for some communities to stay connected. It is used in a variety of different ways, including to:

• Stay connected. Micro-blogging allows members of a community to be in very close contact on an ongoing basis as they subscribe to each other’s “tweet” feeds. It is way to follow what members are up to through the website or through a desktop or mobile application.
• Leverage the network. Community members can also use these “tweet” messages to get just-in-time help, instant responses to a request for information, or quick feedback on a thought or new idea.
• Filter multiple sources. “Following” people you trust who share information that interests you serves as a filter to the multiplicity of content that is now available on the web. There is no reason to follow everything, just the people in your community (and beyond) whose tweets you trust to be interesting or useful.
• Live tweeting of an event. Communities sometimes choose a “hashtag” (a tag with the # symbol before it) when they are holding an event. Participants and people interested in the event can report about or actively follow the event by including the hashtag in their tweets.

Analytics, such as Google Analytics, enable community leaders to collect, analyze, and act on data they receive about how people are connecting to their website. Data is easily collected and represented in many different ways. A community leader can see which pages are being read by whom, from where, and through which browser or media. As well as enabling community leader to observe which content is popular it helps them to know who to reach out to and provides information for making decisions about which tools to use for which members of the community.

Communities can use a set of tags as communal keywords, thus creating shared set of pointers to resources relevant to members. A “tag cloud” (the set of tags that a community uses sized according to frequency of use) can be a way to represent dynamically what a community is interested in and where its learning is focusing. It can be interesting for members to visualize their membership by comparing their own tag cloud that of their community.

A tag can also have its own “feed”. This means that members can stay subscribed to a tag, being notified when content tagged with a specific term is used.

Feeds, such as RSS feeds, are used in two ways. They enable communities to:

• Distribute content beyond the people who visit their website. Members and non-members can subscribe to feeds through an aggregator so they are automatically updated through a web portal, news reader or email whenever new content is published to a site.

 

• Combine content through bundling feeds into “widgets”, “gadgets” or mobile devises that make it possible to display blogs, videos, slideshows, news headlines etc. into another website. This means that communities can combine and integrate the content from different tools in different ways onto their website.

As the number of communities increases, feeds enable people to manage their participation across multiple communities – a challenge that is becoming central to the usefulness of communites.

Communities use blogs, such as Blogger or WordPress, in two ways: individual blogs and collective blogs.

• Individual blogs give people a personal voice as contributors to a community. Some communities offer individual blogs inside the community space for specific purposes, such as telling personal stories of practice. Some communities also point to the personal blogs of their members outside the community space, for instance by including member’s blogs on their “blog roll” (links to associated sites). Informal communities also develop as conversations connect related blogs through postings and comments that point to each other across blogs.
• Collective blogs are also used by communities as shared chronological spaces for posting opinions or news items. In some cases, a community blog acts as a kind of dynamic, online newsletter to keep members or broader audiences up-to-date on what is happening in and around the community. In other cases, a collective blog focuses on a topic and the chronological stream of postings and comments forms a kind of conversation on that topic.
• Aggregated blogs such as planets can be used to create a shared feed among members (and others), which can retrieve a set of posts on selected topics. Such aggregation allows members to contribute to the community while focusing on their own blog. When done collectively, this creates a community’s view of the blogosphere with respect to topics related to its domain.

When a blog is updated it “pings” a server, which generates a list of blogs that have new material. This enables people to know when there new material has been published on a blog site. It is also used to notify someone when their blog has been linked to by another blog. Pinging enables people to automatically stay updated to new blog posts. It is also a way that bloggers keep up to date with the people who are referring to them.