"Social Media for Learning" meets "Show Your Work": The 21 Day Drawing Challenge

There's a fun social learning activity going on via Lynda.com., the "21 Day Drawing Challenge" . Led by artist Von Glitschka, the project offers a daily new assignment (like "draw a cat" or "draw a man on a unicycle using only a continuous line") along with a quick overview video and printable reference worksheet. 

Additional support and participant interaction happen via a Facebook page.  There Von Glitschka offers additional tips and sometimes directs participants to tutorials in other courses. Even better: People use the comments area on the daily Facebook posts to share pictures of their own drawings and to talk about what they found especially challenging or describe the technique they used. It's a great example of people interacting around a shared purpose, showing their work, helping each other learn.

Many people are also sharing their images via Twitter (#draw21days); @kristinrtaylor tweeted a picture and said: "My first go at @lynda #draw21days challenge. Getting over my fear of others seeing my work. Have to start somewhere!" 

So if you're interested in using social media to support instruction, and/or seeing how "show your work" really works (or if you're interested in learning to draw!) do pop by and take a look. Day 3 has just started so there's still time to catch up if you'd like to join the fun. 

What Does Learning Look Like? This.

3 Birds, One Stone

Bird 1: I do lots of workshops on using social media for learning, and I struggle to help participants see the possibilities of using images rather than text-based approaches in their work. Thanks to email and discussion boards, we tend to fall into "comment here, post there, respond to that" kinds of interactions. But now, with so many workers armed with cell phones, nearly all of which have decent cameras, there are so many more possibilities for using images and video in our work. A plus: This can level the playing field for people with low-literacy or second-language issues.


Bird 2: I struggle with helping learners recognize when they are learning. They think of it instead as "solving a problem" or "getting an answer". They don't say, "Gee, I'm a motivated, self-directed adult learner, and I think I'll become more mindful of that." They instead say, "I'll just Google 'spreadsheet tutorial' and see what I find." And if they don't recognize when they're learning, it may just not occur to them to share their new learning with others, or mention it to the boss, or include it in their weekly status report. 


Bird 3: My whole career I have struggled to help managers and HR Directors and supervisors and workers understand that "learning" rarely looks like "school". Because of their experience with education, they believe learning happens at tables (or in front of a computer) while an expert talks. 


One Stone: 
This morning (thanks to Dan Pontefract @dpontefract sharing something via Valerie Irvine @_valeriei, who were posting this, the brainchild of Jeffery Heil @jheil65 -- that's how Twitter works, see?) I ran across the most wonderful big stone that hits squarely on all 3 birds: being mindful about learning, while showing what it really looks like, all done via sharing photos on Pinterest on a board called "What Does Learning Look Like?"  


Fabulous answer to a fabulous question. And worth much more than 1,000 words. 

Social Learning and Etc.: In Conversation with Jane Hart

Jane Hart and I got together to talk about social learning, social media, change management, and measuring engagement in online communities. Here's the recording: Her audio's not great so she let me do most of the talking. I didn't do anything to cause that-- I promise.