Yesterday I attended the Melbourne Learning Summit.  It’s a meetup group for Melbourne based Learning and Development professionals that are hosted by the group members for the group members.  The topic of the summit was “Building a Learning Culture”.

I found out about this group recently through an ex-colleague in the organisation, IAG I finished work with last week.  She mentioned this group to me and asked me to go along to their previous meet up which was at the offices of LinkedIn and enthusiastically, I agreed to go along.

The group was set up by Mathias Otte and if you’re a Melbourne based Learning and Development consultant or work in the area, then it’s free to join.  Members connect with each other via a private LinkedIn Group and its an example of a social learning community in action.

Four times per year, an event is hosted by one of the members at their workplaces.  Yesterday, it was at the IAG premises and it was great to catch up with my ex-colleagues again despite it being a week since I saw them last!

As is customary at these events, the host provides a short presentation about their organisation and Learning and Development strategy and where questions are welcomed. I find that this is quite a spirited part of the proceedings because L&D people are eager to learn how others in the field “do learning”.

Afterwards, there is usually an activity of some sort that gets the group up on their feet and working on some issue or challenge in our field. 

Yesterday’s activity was hosted by NAB (another previous employer of mine).  I liked this activity because the results of the group work were wrapped around Senge’s 5 Disciplines of a Learning Organisation. Having recently read the book (FINALLY!) it made me realise that nothing much has changed in organisations since the 1990s when the book was written.

Attending events like these where groups are intimate, I’m also mindful of sharing out to the public sphere hence the lack of photos in my tweets. 

Certainly, there’s consideration of what can be shared publicly because I’m unsure of the etiquette when no one else is sharing on social media and it’s not explicitly commented about what can be shared and what can’t. 

There’s a whole level of unwritten and unexpressed protocols in conference gatherings that could be a minefield.  Just because I think that as a presenter, anything you share in the forum can be shared to the wider public, others may not think that way.   Although in many of these (and other gatherings such as conferences), we hardly, if ever, get to see the actual ‘live’ learning systems anyway, preferring to talk about the generalities or the case study.

I tried something different this time around and it was an idea that I saw from Naval Ravikant @Naval recent tweets on the blockchain.

He used the threaded reply and numbered his tweets to create a timeline of tweets.  So I decided to try the same thing to capture a thread of what was happening in the room to see how this would work by providing a chronological snapshot of the main themes that were being discussed (without the photos of the slides of course).

The irony is not lost on me that I used Twitter like Snapchat without the video, audio, annotations and emoticons and recreating the general mood of the room. Can you see now why I like Snapchat for capturing learning so much??!!

Experimenting with Twitter Moments

So after I created all these tweets using the threaded replies, I asked myself, “Can I storify the entire lot into some order?”  (Storify means collate the tweets into some order to create a narrative/story).  Given that I was the only person tweeting, the story you’re going to get is only one sided, unfortunately…

As I hadn’t used the #MelbourneLearningSummit for each of my tweets, it meant that I couldn’t collate them all as easily using the search functionality (usually the platform searches through each tweet and picks it up but as individual tweets did not have the hashtag, they weren’t picked up automatically).   It would mean that I would have to individually pick each tweet and create the timeline myself.

Also, given that I hadn’t used Twitter Moments,I thought I’d experiment with this (somewhat new) Twitter function by collating these tweets so that I can then create the embed code to insert into this post.

Another reason I didn’t use Storify is that there was no other content shared across any other social platform so Twitter Moments works well in this case.

Here is what the end result looks like:
Melbourne Learning Summit

Some Last Thoughts About the Summit

Melbourne Learning Summit is for people who are currently employed in the L&D field and as such not open to independent consultants as myself (well until such a time I find the next short term contract again…) or vendors.  However, it’s good to know that it’s there when I’m back inside an organisation and want a community of Learning and Development people to connect with who are more local.    If you’re in an L&D role for any corporate, I recommend you join the Melbourne Learning Summit.