Topic 3: Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning

What I found particularly interesting when working on this topic was the difference between a learning community and a learning network as summarized by Kay Oddone in her YouTube presentations. I tried reflecting on my own experience with the two forms of online learning and came up with two examples.

The online learning network that I actively use is LinkedIn. I have a profile there for over a decade and I try to keep it up-to-date. At the moment, I have close to 900 connections and, at least according to LinkedIn standards, my profile is as strong as it can be. While I try my best not to add or accept invitations from people I don’t know, I only consider 10% of my connections to be strong. These are people I know relatively well professionally, with whom I have talked or worked over the years and who in turn (I hope) do not have to think twice about who I am. Not surprisingly, these are also the people who provide endorsements for my skills and who usually react to my posts or profile updates (as I do to theirs). So, what about the 90% remaining connections? Putting aside maybe 20% family and childhood and university friends (i.e., people I would be friends with on other, non-professional social media), the rest are weak connections. They are mostly students I have taught or supervised and researchers or practitioners I have met at conferences or other professional events. If I look through my list of such “weak” connections, I sometimes have to think hard about when I met some of them, and I am pretty sure that is mutual.

So why connect in this organic, undefined and flexible network as Kay Oddone describes it? On the one side, to me LinkedIn is a more environmentally friendly rolodex. I really look forward to the moment in the (near) future where people just bump smart devices to exchange LinkedIn profile information rather than exchange business cards. I am aware that already exists, but I still come back with a stack of business cards after each event that I use to connect with people on LinkedIn and then recycle. I am also aware that there are other professional networks out there, but LinkedIn is the biggest and most successful. On the other side, for me LinkedIn has truly been a great resource for online learning. As pointed out by Kay Oddone, the potential for overwhelming amounts of information which characterizes online network learning is still present on LinkedIn, but to a lesser extent than on other social networks. For most intents and purposes, people keep it professional on LinkedIn and over the years I have found quite a lot of inspiration for my teaching and research. That ranged from posts, videos, articles and academic publications I could use in my own courses and research projects to events I ended up joining. Importantly, the resources I found on LinkedIn were not always coming from my own fields of interest, but from connections from different fields.

As with other social media networks, LinkedIn users can suffer from social comparison bias: being exposed to so many weak connections and their “success” stories on a daily basis might make people feel less-accomplished. That is less likely to happen in a learning community where the majority of ties are strong and intentional while membership is less flexible. One such example would be a LinkedIn special interest group built around a focused research topic (i.e., service research) that I am a member of. Not surprisingly, the majority of my strong connections are members of this group. We all know each other for quite some time as we’ve been attending the same yearly conferences and workshop and have been conducting and publishing research together. Of course, this online learning community is not devoid of upward or downward social comparison, but we all know the community quite well and what it takes to be successful, so it is somewhat easier to cope with one’s own success and failure (in other words it’s much easier to spot window dressing and general bullshit). As Kay Oddone stresses in her presentation, the potential for an inward focus is one of the disadvantages of online learning communities and I sometimes see this in our LinkedIn group. So, while the content posted there is highly relevant for our research and teaching interests, it is sometimes too biased towards the theories and methods we are most comfortable with.

So, how to best learn collaboratively? I guess by trying to balance online learning communities and online learning networks in an efficient and healthy way. As a personal rule, I have all notifications off and only access LinkedIn once a day. Following the right people and joining groups with shared interests had been very helpful in curating my news feed, but I also leave room to be surprised by insights from weak connections. This of course applies to any social media, but again, on LinkedIn, the professional relevance is much higher.