What is life without social networking? Nothing. Well if you don’t have a social networking account, you have no stand. You are considered to be old school. Who can deny the evolution of the e-learning species? No one can. Well, if you do, then you live on the moon and not amongst us.
Well, the latest leap taken by e-learning platform is to merge themselves with the social networking sites. We are bombarded with the popularity of these social networking sites like Facebook, My space, and Orkut over the past couple of years. Today you even have professional social networking sites like Linked in, Xing, Viadeo and HigherEdSpace.com. These seem to be mushrooming everywhere and anywhere.
Bigger firms and companies are also giving rise to internal social networks which are more important for them. Especially the training managers who want to make use of Wikipedia and other blog tool given to us by the Web 2.0.
Organizations are already spending a lot of money on the Web 2.0 tools. They make a special budget for these as we all know these tools are handy and make life easier for us. the Forrester Research report stated that the bigger organizations will be spending a lot more money on the Web 2.) technologies in the coming years. In the next five years itself, it will reach $ 4.6bn globally by 2013. Each year, this requirement is growing by 43 percent. This is so because it is increasingly helping customers and employees to stay connected and collaborate.
There are many softwares emerging today that will allow users to integrate various networking abilities with their talents and also with their performance management systems. The people management software and service provider, Job partners launched the Active Networker, earlier this year. This is a corporate social networking tool which will promote employee communication and information sharing. Another software Cornerstone connects launched by Cornerstone OnDemand, is a social networking platform that will integrate the talent management software and services.
Technology has helped us to share knowledge and gain knowledge through sharing. Although, now things are quite different. First this sharing and exchange was done in a haphazard, confused and disorganized manner. Now it is all corporate like as we are all coming closer due to globalization, mergers and other acquisitions. Hence even if people are working remotely, they stay connected. They put up a challenge for the employees through various ways of staying connected and knowledge sharing. It is stated that if such tools are lined to talent management softwares and earning programs, it will help to boost the efficiency.
The Cornerstone Connect software has wikipedias, blogs, discussion forums, and boards, pod cast options and RSS feeds. They also have communities of practice and knowledge management. It s often seen that people mingle more after the classes and that is when you learn more about each other. Therefore, tools play an important part in social or informal learning.
Life has definitely changed with the advent of these software’s. There is s much more you can do and more can be done using these softwares. Of course all these sites need to be monitored. This is so because the creators of such tools may not have thought of the ill effects it might have or the kind of misuse that can be done through these tools. I am not saying that such things will happen, but given opportunity, people would want to check out things like these.
Therefore, it is best used for knowledge sharing and learning. This has definitely boosted the e-learning process amongst the employees.