We have been talking about how learning collaboration using technology such as Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter has opened new collaborative opportunities. Let’s look at some other types of learning collaboration.

Recently I was working with a Fortune 500 company who wanted to keep their leadership engaged after their bi-yearly leadership town halls. The company found that during the town hall all levels of leadership were engaged and collaborating with each other and the leaders naturally formed small learning communities where peer learning occurred. But when the town halls ended, the leaders went back to their normal routines and the learning communities were no longer active until the next bi-yearly town hall. Has something like this happened in your organization?

To address this issue, the company incorporated monthly “Coaching Cafés” where small groups of leaders met to discuss, collaborate and share ideas. Meeting regular in small learning communities resulted in continuous learning for the leaders and improved overall team performance.

Some examples of how learning communities can be incorporated into learning are:

• Face-to-face where students can interact—in real time—to discuss a topic, as happened in my example
• Virtual where students can interact synchronously or asynchronously using live chat rooms, Wikis, blogs and virtual meeting rooms such as WebEx
• Blended where learning communities receive “the best of both worlds.” Students can use face-to-face discussions as well as continue sharing information and learning from each other using technology such as Wikis and blogs.

Learning communities can be incorporated into a variety of learning formats. We have only shared a few. How have you been using learning communities in your training? What are some examples of learning communities that you would like to share?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 8:43 am and is filed under 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.