If you’ve ever taken a river-rafting tour, you know that the first thing you learn (aside from “never try to stand up”) is how to row together as a group. Although everyone else in your raft may be a stranger to you, you quickly discover that collaborative effort by the whole group is necessary if the raft is going to go anywhere except in a circle.

The same is true of learning communities, groups of learners brought together to gain a deeper understanding of a subject through sharing and collaboration. As trainers and educators, we all know that “top-down” instruction (in which the instructor delivers content that the learner passively receives) is the least effective instructional method available to us. That’s why we work diligently to improve learner engagement through interactions with course content both in the classroom and online. Learning communities are a way to increase learner interaction.

Learner collaboration isn’t a new technique in classroom instruction; group projects have always been integral to good instructor-led training. For e-learning, however, the growth and widespread public acceptance of participatory online media (YouTube, Wikipedia and blogs like this one) and social networking (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) have opened new collaborative opportunities.

The academic community has adopted these new Web 2.0 technologies more readily than the business world, where management typically views social media as potential employee distractions and time-wasters. Over time, however, more of these learning community elements have begun to appear in corporate training efforts, particularly wikis and blogs.

And more changes are coming. While most of us in this field are still working out the best ways to utilize Web 2.0 collaborative and social networking tools in our training development, technology visionaries are already developing Web 3.0 applications, several of which seem designed explicitly for collaborative learning and use by learning communities. These new applications include Twine and Interactyx.

Have you been using learning communities in your training? Are you looking for ways to adopt collaborative learning strategies and integrate social networking into your online and blended learning efforts? Do you have or do you know about any noteworthy examples of learning communities that you want to share?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 2:04 pm and is filed under VILT, WBT, e-Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.