201 How Social Networks Make Us Stupid
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Collaborative, Social, and Informal Learning: Where Do Learning Professionals Fit? November 18 & 19, 2015 201 How Social Networks Make Us Stupid Robin Hoyle, Learnworks Supplemental Materials This an edited extract from Informal Learning in Organizations: How to create a culture of continuous learning by Robin Hoyle, published by Kogan Page, September 2015. Liking Ain’t Learning: The rise of social and the impact of technology It would be churlish not to accept that web 2.0, the so-called ‘read – write’ web has not had an impact on our ability to learn informally. Being constantly connected to information via the World Wide Web has changed the world of work for pretty much all of us. Not only are we connected to data, news and information, we are also connected to people. Conversations with colleagues, competitors, consultants and conspiracy theorists are only a click away. In this Liking Ain’t Learning I’m going to explore how technology has impacted our ability to learn informally. In some cases it has smoothed the path to skills and knowledge and widened horizons. In other situations it has been less of a boon than some may believe. Informal Learning in Organizations © Robin Hoyle 2015 Not to be replicated without author’s permission Olf_128_201 Page 1 of 12 I received a phone call the other day. It was my daughter – her smartphone had been playing up and she was in the provisions aisle of a supermarket on her old and under-whelming handset – you know, the ones you can do things like ring people up on. Anyway, she was in a minor turmoil. Planning a recipe she needed to know how to convert millilitres into grams. ‘I haven’t got google on this!’ she said, plaintively. I understood her plight. We have become so used to accessing instant facts on our smartphones, tablets and PCs that we find ourselves unable to recall basic information from schooldays – or at least unwilling to trust our memories on these things. Looking things up has never been easier and will never be the same again. As computers become wearable and our internet access becomes permanent, only a social and cultural rejection of being always connected will change our 24/7 internet dependent lives. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, whether a cultural revolution which will reject the ubiquity of Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter will start anytime soon, I leave you to be the judge. The World Wide Web and the many sites, apps and platforms which rely on it seems to me to have been, on balance, positive. There is nothing wrong with having an unimaginably thorough encyclopaedia at all of our fingertips (or wherever the next generation of devices will be located). Giving each and every one of us the capability to publish our thoughts, opinions and theories and to share the nuggets we find with friends and family is also OK. However, as the Huffington Post reported in July 2014: “You may have been surprised to learn that Facebook experimented on nearly 700,000 Facebook users for one week in the summer of 2012. The site manipulated their News Feeds to prioritize positive or negative content, attempting to determine if emotions spread contagiously through social networks. There was no age restriction on the data, meaning it may have involved users under 18.”i These and other recent exposés about the lack of privacy that entails and the business models of some of the ‘free’ platforms which we use to publish pictures of our breakfast/cat/toddler may give some of us pause for thought. The whole idea of a web which no longer restricts our roles to those of consumer but now enables each of us to be a writer, film maker, photographer or artist seems generally positive. That said, I could live without the cute videos of kittens in boxes but I guess every advance has its price. Those same platforms which open up the world of publishing, sharing and collaboration are being increasingly touted as learning tools and in this regard I’m not so sure. I’m a bit anti-social What do we call this new phenomena of online learning from experts, peers and acquaintances? Training is old hat and implies someone with knowledge and skills imparting them to someone who should have them now, or in the future, whether they think they need them or not. The buzz word used to describe what we all do, by those of us engaged in improving the capability of employees, has been development. But social development sounds like we’re operating a finishing school before launching our graduates on polite society. This wouldn’t do at all. The other focus for training people has been learning. I used to do a cheap gag at conferences: ‘What’s the difference between a training officer and learning officer? About five grand a year – boom, boom!’ But despite my cynicism that often what is described as ‘learning’ is actually Informal Learning in Organizations © Robin Hoyle 2015 Not to be replicated without author’s permission Olf_128_201 Page 2 of 12 just training in a more expensive suit, the terminology has stuck. So what do we call learning which uses social media? Why, of course, Social Learning! Except…. Social learning is a term which is already taken. If you consult any psychology book – especially about child development – you will find the name of Albert Banduraii, the most often cited living psychologist. He came up with his ‘social learning theory’30 in the 1960s by looking at how children imitated what their peers and – crucially - important role models did through observation. Subsequent studies have observed chimpanzees; whales and other mammals learn novel ways to forage or new techniques to hunt by imitating the behaviours of skilled members of the troop, group or pod. This does not seem to me to be what is happening online in social networks. Whether employees have access to a publically available social network such as Facebook or twitter or whether there is a purpose built tool on the corporate intranet, the process is not imitative. It is information sharing. When in the hands of our mavens it is also mostly a way of information sharing with few of those consuming the output doing much beyond reading it and moving on to the next thing. Now some have attempted to justify the use of the term by citing Bandura. One social media enthusiast recently penned an article in which Bandura’s focus on social interaction was claimed to be just as valid a discussion of what happens on twitter as it was as a route to explaining how a group of 3 year olds in the 1960’s imitated the adult behaviours they had observed. The role model/authority figure in these interactions is central to social learning theory, the presence of what Vygotsky called a more knowledgeable otheriii. In Vygotsky’s social development theory, the more knowledgeable other (or MKO) is usually thought of as being a teacher, but in practice could be anyone who knows more about, or is more experienced in the particular area where learning is required. The person who determines whether a person is an MKO is the learner. The attempt to hitch the social media wagon to these well researched child development studies seems to be a strained relationship at best. In fact, the whole idea of a community in which we are all teachers and yet no one is seems central to the basic premise of the use of social media in the learning sphere. My reading of social learning theory seems to completely dismiss such a free-for- all. The teacher/role model/MKO is an essential component. The social learning nomenclature just won’t do. It is opportunistic, inaccurate and lazy. Most disappointingly for those who are allegedly at the forefront of innovation, it is unimaginative. Learning or just copying? The world of social media in learning and development is far from rosy on one other essential component. Is the exchange of information characterised by the tweets of our mavens and the authority-light blogs of any new sages who have joined the maven’s ranks really learning? In the spring and summer of 2013, a group of researchers overseen by Iyad Rahwan worked with 100 subjects at the University of Oregon. The object of the experiment was to see what difference a social network made to the ability of learners to perform analytical tasks. The results were clear. The cognitive reasoning tests have been used in many different experiments and are Informal Learning in Organizations © Robin Hoyle 2015 Not to be replicated without author’s permission Olf_128_201 Page 3 of 12 accepted to be effective measures of the ability of an individual to overcome their initial, intuitive response to a question. For example, one of the questions asks: A bat and ball costs $1.10. If the bat costs $1 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost? The intuitive response to this question is 10c. However, if that was the answer, the bat would cost $1 and therefore be only 90c more expensive than the ball. It requires a degree of analysis to work out that the true cost of the ball is 5c, the bat $1.05 and therefore the total cost $1.10 with the bat costing one dollar more than the ball. One group simply answered the questions – alone and unconnected to anyone else. They became the baseline group. Thereafter, groups were asked the questions individually and then given access to the answers of others in a range of different networks.