Some time ago, I ran a couple of sessions of Twitter for Professional Development to my Learning and Development colleagues in my current workplace.  The aim was to share how I use Twitter to grow and connect with a personal learning network and to learn new trends happening in our profession.

The sessions were conducted during the lunch hour as “lunch and learns” and we used the #lunchlearn101 to expand the conversation.

These were quite successful and I was asked to run them for another 2 external companies: one private and one public sector.  You can read about it here.  It was also one of the popular posts as I believe the content may have been reused by others – which I’m all happy about in the spirit of ‘showing your work’.

Since then, my mind has been ticking over with how I could recreate a connectivist MOOC in a corporate environment – a corporate miniMOOC so-to-speak using the social networking tools that we have currently at our disposal and spending no money whatsoever (let’s face it, there’s NO budget and new implementations of systems and tools or additional resources such as people,  are a no-go area in these tough times).  

With this in mind, as I fend off vendors for a while, I have decided that going connectivist may be a shock to the corporate system – it’s simply too much of a foreign concept.  My thinking lends me to believe that informal learning is already happening in my workplace as subject matter experts ‘pop up’ every so often and run their own informal learning workplace activities and events.  Basically, they’re taking matters into their own hands and not waiting for the formal Learning and Development to structure programs for them.

For example, we have SMEs running informal sessions around topics like:

• Accessibility
• Web writing
• 3 D printing
• LinkedIn

And then there’s me with my Twitter for Professional Development

So with this in mind, rather than create a connectivist MOOC, stealthily, I’m collating a list of people who are already providing informal learning around topics related to Digital Literacy and in future, will approach them to ‘bundle up’ their offerings into a corporate mini MOOC.  In effect they are the SMEs for their particular content pieces, they’re getting a name out in the company for running these so why not approach them and work with them to create a Digital Learning program delivered through a cMOOC style where people can opt in and opt out of whatever topic they want – they don’t have to do the whole lot – but they can pick and choose the topic relevant to them.

We still have certain topics to develop but these can be organised over time – or, when we do have some budget available, seek out vendors who can provide the topics to support digital literacy skills in our organisation.

So what does this mean for me?

With the support of my colleague @Virtual_MCS we have decided to roll out a series of live online events through Webex for anyone in our company who would like to learn more about Twitter and how to use this tool for their professional development and growing their network.

Where I structured the presentation in the past to be focussed on people in the Learning and Development field, I’m now going wider.  All professions, all fields, all roles in our company.

I have redesigned the slides to work with an interactive hands-on live online event with lots of activities peppered throughout as well as an application sharing demonstration.   The only difference to this session compared to my earlier sessions is that I also focus on how to identify spammers and linking our social media policy so that we can cover off some tips and techniques for using the tool in a professional sense.

We will roll these out in late August when I get back from my holidays overseas and I’ll let you know how they go.

Once again, we will use the #lunchlearn101 as our Twitter hashtag to continue the conversation so if you happen to see this in your stream, please feel free to join in!

<div style=”margin-bottom:5px”> <strong> <a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/Anchorgirls/twitter-for-professional-development-live-online-event-slides” title=”Twitter for Professional Development Live Online Event Slides ” target=”_blank”>Twitter for Professional Development Live Online Event Slides </a> </strong> from <strong><a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/Anchorgirls” target=”_blank”>Helen Blunden</a></strong> </div>