Many myths and misconceptions circulate regarding the use of social computing in the workplace; some organisations control (or believe they control) their employees use of social media, others embrace use of social computing without clear aims for its alignment with business goals or guidelines for appropriate use, and some have put social computing at the core of their business and have demonstrated real value in its effective use.
The efficacy of social computing for workplace learning the subject of my MSc research dissertation. Here are the high level questions I intend to answer.
- What is it that technology brings to social learning in the workplace that cannot be otherwise easily achieved?
- How organizations define ‘effectiveness’ with respect to technology based social learning?
- How do organizations link social learning to their business goals?
- How do they measure the impact of social learning as means for increasing knowledge and skills in the workplace?
- How do organizations that actively embrace and encourage social computing differ in terms of their overall performance from those that discourage or do not make planned use of these technologies?
I will be posting a survey on this subject in early June, in the meantime, I would be pleased to hear from TZ readers how they might answer any of the above questions for their business.
