Slack for Mobile Social Workplace Learning
Made With: Canvas LMS, Slack App
Time in Development: 3 Weeks
Preview the Course: Slack for Mobile Social Workplace Learning
Workplace Learning Problem
Formal training and development programs, traditionally off-site and delivered from instructor to employee, are expensive, disruptive, and difficult-to-scale. Developments in e- learning over the past twenty years have mitigated some of the financial and logistical constraints of in-person training, but still often impose an artificial physical and thus conceptual distance between the instructional content and the performance context (De Vries & Lukosch, 2009, p. 39). Approaches to workplace training that support situated, social learning can better support the ways in which people actually learn – from others, across contexts, and according to need.
Learning Theory
The majority of learning that takes place on the job is constructed through task performance, self-directed inquiry, and informal interaction with others. An effective workplace training program, then, should be inclusive of a sociocultural and constructivist pedagogy. Introduced most notably by Vygotsky, the theory of learning as a tool-mediated social process has influenced much of Western educational theory since the 1970s.
Among the theory informed by Vygotsky’s research was Kearney et al.’s 2012 framework of mobile learning, a perspective that reinforced the importance of taking a pedagogy-first approach to learning design. Mobile technologies, by extending the reach of Web 2.0 social tools across learners’ diverse contexts, can be effectively aligned with socio-constructivist learning programs if thoughtfully integrated. Kearney et al. identify three distinctive features of mobile learning: personalization, authenticity, and collaboration (Kearney et al., 2012, p. 8). The mobile learning project I propose is designed to leverage those three key qualities in support of effective social learning in the workplace.
Setting
Slack for Mobile Social Workplace Learning is an online training module designed to introduce a widely-applicable, content-agnostic Learning & Development strategy for organizations with geographically distributed or large numbers of employees. These organizations have committed to including social learning and informal, employee-led learning as part of their training programs.
Learners
This online module is designed for adult employees of large or geographically-distributed organizations. These employees may operate primarily in the workplace, but may be required to travel for various purposes in support of their job. The materials do not assume anything more than the basic technological literacy required to function in the modern workplace. Learners will make use of personal or company-provided mobile devices to install and use the Slack app for their mobile social workplace learning.
Organizations of this kind hold many widely ranging goals, but one likely shared objective is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of human resources. With high- performing employees, organizations are better equipped to achieve their goals, whatever they may be. Improved performance often requires practice, certainly, but also access to information – whether located in digital artifacts or in their colleagues. Informal social learning represents an important part of workplace learning as it leverages the institutional knowledge housed in and distributed across an organization’s employees (Cook et al., 2012, p. 714). Informal learning through dialogue is easily achieved when workers can convene in a breakroom or around a water cooler. For large and distributed organizations, though, informal learning through inter- professional knowledge sharing requires the use of a mediating technology.
Slack in Support of Mobile Social Learning
Slack is one popular technology for team communications. In its most basic form, Slack is a real-time messaging app that seeks to house all team or company communications in one place. With its document-sharing, archival, and customizable automated chatbots, though, Slack becomes a powerhouse tool for sharing, storing, and searching an organization’s collective knowledge.
Slack for Mobile Social Workplace Learning is a company-wide collaborative approach to training and development that will lower the barriers to informal social learning in large and geographically distributed organizations. Learners are introduced to a strategy of using Slack on their mobile devices to find and communicate with their coworkers while on-the-go. Learners are trained in the basics of customizing a Slackbot by pairing trigger words or phrases with automated responses to help surface relevant information and social resources within the organization.
Similar to the way in which multiple users collaboratively build wikis, employees will learn how to use their mobiles to add authentic, situated knowledge artifacts to their Slack team based on their individual skills, knowledge, and professional expertise. Learners are encouraged to make use of the recording features of their mobile devices to capture knowledge artifacts while situated in the performance context.
Constraints
To respond to the potential challenges of disruption and “continual divided attention” posed by a chat-based social learning program, this strategy of mobile social learning with Slack will allow for alternate means of engagement (Turkle, 2008). Employees who welcome social interaction and questions from their colleagues can pair their Slack username with keywords, indicating that they will act as a resource for that topic. Employees who prefer to be less frequently approached for help can spend more time up-front adding multimedia knowledge resources for frequently asked questions into the program.
Learning Objectives
- By the end of this online module, learners will be able to download the Slack app to their mobile device, configure it for their individual needs, and get started finding information, connecting to coworkers, and sharing resources.
- With their mobile devices, learners will be able to access just-in-time, contextualized information and social resources using the collaborative knowledge hosted on the mobile Slack app.
Design Principles
Design guidelines for integration of mobile technologies in informal workplace learning |
Strategies and resources for mobile learning programs |
|---|---|
| Sharing experiences in a social network facilitates the transformation of personal learning outcomes into durable, valuable, and collective knowledge assets (Zolfo et al., 2010) | Support learners in finding or developing social groups where they can share their own professional experiences and learn from the experiences of others. Provide learners with an initial list of existing Communities of Practice on Twitter, Facebook, or message boards with whom they can engage using mobile apps. Encourage learners to seek out other groups more directly aligned with their personal work contexts. |
| Feeling there is an expectation of immediate response in a social learning experience can lead to stress and discomfort that are counter- productive to learning (Holley & Sentance, 2015; Turkle, 2008) | Ensure that the organization clarifies its definition of and expectations for appropriate response time. Provide alternate knowledge resources when immediate peer learning is not available by collaboratively sharing knowledge artifacts and programming automated chat bots to respond to common queries. |
| Learners must be able to find and activate connections to relevant colleagues for the purpose of social learning (Cook, 2012) | Use social tagging tools to classify and organize knowledge and skills distributed across employees. Ensure that learners can search tags. Allow employees to include the format by which they prefer to be contacted. |
| Social learning can increase employee workload and contribute to a feeling of “continuous partial attention” (Cook, 2012; (Turkle, 2008) | Enable employees to contribute to the collective social knowledge in several ways. Employees who prefer less frequent contact by their peers can add information and resources to Slack archives or program responses into the Slackbot. |
| Curating digital artifacts is a technologically- mediated activity in support of constructivist learning. Capturing and deciding what category in which to submit a multimedia object requires the learner to think critically about its relationship to other objects as knowledge resources (Novak, Wang, & Callaghan, 2012, p. 102). | Encourage learners to capture audio, video, and photo-based artifacts with their mobile devices to submit to a collective knowledge repository. Have learners apply categories or thematic tags to enhance the meaning of and coherence among diverse multimedia objects. |
References
Cook, J., & Pachler, N. (2012). Online people tagging: Social (mobile) network(ing) services and work-based learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 43(5), 711–725. http:// doi.org 10.1111/j.1467-8535.2012.01346.x
De Vries, P., & Lukosch, H. (2009). Supporting Informal Learning at the Workplace. International Journal of Advanced Corporate Learning, 2(3). doi:10.3991/ijac.v2i3.1004
Gurtner, J., Cattaneo, A., Motta, E., & Mauroux, L. (2011). How Often and for What Purposes Apprentices Seek Help in Workplaces: A Mobile Technology-Assisted Study. Vocations and Learning, 4(2), 113-131. doi:10.1007/s12186-011-9053-x
Holley, D., & Sentance, S. (2015). Mobile “ Comfort ” Zones : Overcoming Barriers to Enable Facilitated Learning in the Workplace. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, (1), 1–9.
Kearney, M., Schuck, S., Burden, K., & Aubusson, P. (2012). Viewing mobile learning from a pedagogical perspective. Research In Learning Technology, 20:1, 1-17. doi:10.3402/rlt.v20i0/14406.
Novak, D., Wang, M., & Callaghan, V. (2012). Looking In, Looking Out: A Discussion of the Educational Affordances of Current Mobile Augmented Reality Technologies. In J. Jai (Ed.) Educational Stages and Interactive Learning: From Kindergarten to Workplace Training. (pages 92 -206).
Turkle, S. (2008). Always-on/always-on-you: The tethered self. In J. E. Katz (Ed.), Handbook of mobile communication studies (pp. 121-137). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Retrieved from http://web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/pdfsforstwebpage/ST_Always%20On.pdf.
Warschauer, M., & Matuchniak, T. (2010). New technology and digital worlds: Analyzing evidence of equity in access, use, and outcomes. Review of Research in Education, 34(1), 179-225.
Zolfo, M., Iglesias, D., Kiyan, C., Echevarria, J., Fucay, L., Llacsahuanga, E., de Waard, I., et al. (2010). Mobile learning for HIV/AIDS healthcare worker training in resource-limited settings. AIDS research and therapy, 7, 35. doi:10.1186/1742-6405-7-35