Extending Your Training’s Impact via Twitter Follow-up
Blog book tour for Jane Bozarth’s Social Media for Trainers
Jane Bozarth is an expert and evangelist for using social media for effective training - in fact, one of the reasons I first joined Twitter was because I’d heard her express her enthusiasm for it during her webinars. And now she’s literally written the book on it - Social Media for Trainers: Techniques for Enhancing and Expanding Learning. I was eager to get to take a look at it as part of her blog book tour, because I’ve found her previous books to be really practical and useful.
In the nonprofit training community, many of us can be skeptical about incorporating new technologies that we’re not sure our training participants will be able to use due to time, expense, or lack of computer skills. At the same time, we all care about making sure our training is high impact, so that we can help make a difference in improving our services for our clients. So I’m going to focus here on one simple, low-tech way to extend training’s impact using Twitter, from the second chapter of Bozarth’s book - it’s a great idea I’m excited to share, because it addresses a real training challenge.
When designing training, a serious concern is “How will we help participants actually DO what they’ve learned once they get back to work?” Jobs are hectic, people forget, and behavior change is difficult. One promising solution is to use Twitter to help your participants bring your training content with them back to their real lives.
You can do this using a free application (Bozarth mentions Social Oomph, Twaitter, or Brizzly) to set up timed, automatic Tweets to your training participants periodically after the session. The messages can provide encouragement, remind participants about key points, share links to articles on the same topic, announce related upcoming events, and give gentle nudges to participants to use the skills and knowledge from the training session.
The Tweets will support your participants in implementing what they learning in training, and it will also create an extended learning community. Because you can set up the Tweets in advance and because Twitter and the Tweeting application are free, this is a training add-on that won’t take much of your time or resources.
If you’re curious about trying out social media to increase the value of training, this could be a simple yet high-impact way to start.
Community Offers Collegial Support, Ideas, and Humor
Last Thursday, I participated for the first time in a weekly live online Twitter event called #lrnchat. This is a weekly guided discussion about training and learning, organized around a particular topic, with participants joining in from around the world via Twitter or a Twitter conferencing suite (I used twubs.com/lrnchat). #lrnchat's tagline is "Where Learning & Social Media Meet." Participants range from newcomers to widely known experts in the education/training/learning/e-learning fields. Transcripts of the chats are posted on the @lrnchat Twitter page, and are also searchable using the hashtag #lrnchat.
What are these about?
Thursday's topic was "Your perfect learning environment?" and the questions were
Q1) If you had a blank slate, what would your ideal learning environment look like?
Q2) what are the barriers keeping your ideal learning experience from becoming real?
Q3) What would be the most important positive thing that could happen to make that ideal state become real?
Bonus) How could #lrnchat as a community, help with either boosting the positive or beating back the negative?
The previous week's topic was "Confessions of trainers and learners," and this week's topic is "The Learning Delta," with questions about how training has changed over the years and how it will change in the future.
How could it benefit nonprofit trainers?
Chatting with training and learning enthusiasts last week was a great way to step back from the day-to-day of my job and hear other professionals' ideas about the field. The conversation was informal and honest, which encouraged participants to take a risk and share their thinking. When patterns emerged, it was interesting to see where folks shared idealist hopes or pet peeves, and it was also interesting to see where people respectfully disagreed.
For trainers who work in small departments or as the only trainer at their organization -- which is the case in many nonprofits -- #lrnchat offers a community of like-minded professionals to learn from, bounce ideas off of, and provide mutual support.
Participating in #lrnchat also taught me a bit about the potential and limitations of using Twitter as a learning tool. As a new Twitterer, it let me jump right into a new type of learning and try it out in a safe environment, and it was a lot more fun and useful than I'd expected. At first, with so many Tweets going by really quickly at times, it felt a little overwhelming, like trying to take a sip from a waterfall, and it was an adjustment to be in such an informal learning environment, with a lot of joking around and friends greeting friends. However, it didn't take much time to get comfortable, and the value of the event quickly became clear.
If you'd like to give it a try
Events take place on Thursday nights at 8:30EST and last for 90 minutes; this week they are adding an ongoing afternoon event at 4:30EST on the same topic. #lrnchat is hosted by@marciamarcia, @quinnovator, @moehlert, @koreenolbrish, and @janebozarth (I first heard about this on one of Jane Bozarth's webinars). Artwork is by@delanotho. For more information, you can go to http://lrnchat.wordpress.com/