I recieved an email from Elliot Masie, as part of my subscription to LearningTown.
As we explore the role of Social Learning in organizational development efforts, I would like to invite you to join me (if you have an account) in a new Facebook group:
Having a Facebook account, I followed the link, and was staggered to see a new group (3hrs later) already have 350+ members. There were two discussion groups plus 15 wall posts. I’ve just logged back in, there are now 497 members 3 discussion forums and 22 wall posts. The predominate message that exists on the wall are comments regarding Facebook’s inability to act as a learning tool. A comment I agree totally upon, but still the viral effect of joining a group continues.
I originally joined Facebook for business purposes, joining various learning groups to promote my business, as well as share information between my peers. As the phenomenon grew, long lost friends, past travellers, friends, exes, former colleagues, family members alike, all wanted to connect to me. It was great to have a social place to share selective information about my life (selective as I was also sharing information with clients and colleagues alike) but found that I was less likely to delve into my groups to follow information, and far more likely to Super Poke a friend, send them a virtual drink on a tough day, and update my status with work related information inadvertently via Twitter that caused a non technical friend to make a comment regarding my sanity “Em, Nice to Tweet you too – WTF???”. I don’t think I am alone.
The power of Facebook to microblog on your day, get snippets of info about your ‘friends’, without picking up the phone, or emailing them directly, enables an aloofness that resonates with a younger generation. Connecting with fellow travellers, getting virtual postcards and being able to show your allegiance to your political party, local brewing house, Marmite and of course your sports team, is a wonderful way to network, but with the current applications that exist within Facebook, they are going to have to implement something v. special to enable anybody to truly learn anything, informally or otherwise.
Barack Obama recognized, as described in Barack Inc by Barry Libert/Rick Faulk the power of the Facebook product and utilized an application to show support of his campaign, by joining a group entitled, Voting for Barack. However he also recognized the power of a platform that enabled social interaction for a common cause, in Facebook’s case its social interaction, but for his campaign he needed a common platform to spread information about his policy, call for campaigners, volunteers and so much did he believe in Facebook’s power that he encouraged entrepreneur Chris Hughes to leave his highly paid job at Facebook and work for his campaign writing my.barackobama.com. He utilized the power of Facebook and created his own plaform for social interaction to connect and focus on a single point – his road to the Presidency. However it is my personal opinion if he had just left it to chance that a Facebook Group would enabled him to pave the way to the White House, targeting the younger generations of voters - GenY and Millenials, then he may have been a few votes short.
I left my comment on the LearningTown Group
Very interested to see how this experiment works out, I feel that Facebook has so many groups and so many applications, that are ‘entertainment’ based that there is too much distraction for any constructive training to be carried out.
If you have a Facebook account, go and check out Elliots group, I’d also love to hear what you think about Facebook as a training medium.
In response to Tony Karrer (100 Questions)
