Trends

Social Media vs Social Communication

Posted on: January 31, 2014Updated on: February 9, 2023By: Axonify Team

This difference was the key takeaway for me from this year’s TechKnowledge conference. Before we get there, let’s start at the beginning. If you were among the lucky ones who avoided the major snowstorms and managed to get to sunny Las Vegas, it was a very good conference. Sadly, our close friend Karl Kapp was one of the unlucky ones:

social communication
You can find all of Karl’s resources from the conference here. Despite the unfortunate weather that barred some folks from attending, the conference had a good turnout and the sessions as well as the keynotes were really compelling. This was my first time at TK and so I thought I’d share some key takeaways:

1. We need to expand our view of “Learning”: In many cases, organizations will focus on ensuring that an employee is functionally trained to do their job. This view helps narrow down exactly what an employee needs to learn to do their job well; however, there is a lot more that an employee needs to learn beyond the function of their job. A lot of times this can be categorized into informal learning; however, what if this informal knowledge actually helped them do their jobs better? I think the lesson here is to realize that even the most mundane pieces of knowledge (e.g. Where the nearest meeting room is) can and should be considered part of an employee’s learning.

2. The importance of choice in the gamification of learning: When it comes to games, there are many genres and naturally people will gravitate toward certain genres over others. When choosing to embed learning into certain genres of games, designers have to make sure that they understand which genres appeal to learners so that the games will actually engage as opposed to repel learners. Another consideration would be to design the learning so that it is independent of the game itself. This way a learner can engage with a genre of their choice and still receive the learning that matters to them.

*Key Takeaway* Social media vs social communication: The biggest piece of learning I took away from TK was that social media is the wrong term for what social media actually is. Social media is really about social communication. When it comes to our need to foster social learning, if we look at it through the lens of improving social communication, the path to achieving our objective becomes a lot clearer. We just need to make sure that the ability to converse with others is embedded into any system that we use for learning.

What were some of your biggest takeaways from the conference? Let’s converse about them in the comments below or via Twitter @Axonify.

Written by John Astorino.

Axonify Team

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