The social age of learning

This week I began in earnest to begin helping to shape the next issue of Lifewide Magazine which is guest edited by Chrissi and Sue. They have organised the most of the content but there are always what I call 'bits and bobs' to be gathered, illustrations to be commissioned, images to be found and above all an identity to be created that is much more than the sum of the collection of articles. As I was googling 'social technologies' - one of the terms that defines the issue I came across Julian Stodd's blog. I immediately recognised a kindred spirit in someone who is thinking and writing about the everyday world of contemporary learning with a particular interest in the role played by technology. I read many of Julian's blogs and loved his simple visualisations. I felt that here was someone I would involve in my learning ecologies. I found one that I thought we might use in the Magazine - Our complex relationship with technology. I emailed him to check it was okay and received a friendly positive response such that it made me want to invite him to connect with our work in a significant way. So who knows what the future will bring?

One of his blogs elaborates his idea of the social age we now live in.. which he describes in these terms..

I use the term ‘The Social Age’ to talk about the environment we inhabit today: it’s a time when the very nature of work is evolving, changing to reflect a revised social contract and the advancement of technology to facilitate sharing and community. In the Manufacturing Age, we used to make stuff: banging together lumps of iron, burning coal, wrestling value from the very earth itself as we wrought iron and carved railways through the landscape, smelting and creating, until we outsourced it all and specialised production in a global network of trade and exchange, bringing us to the Knowledge Age. We convinced ourselves that this was ok: we no longer made stuff, but we had the knowledge, we did the clever bit ourselves and the knowledge was what really mattered. But then the internet evolved and Google was born, phones got smart and small and our relationship with knowledge changed. Finding stuff out is easy. Making sense of it is what counts. Welcome to the Social Age. Power and authority, that used to be gained through knowledge alone, is now based more in effectiveness, in being able to create value and meaning through the effective use of knowledge and resources in agile ways. Simply knowing stuff is not enough............... The Social Age is about high levels of engagement through informal, socially collaborative technology. It supports agility by allowing many and varied connections and the rapid iteration of ideas in communities that are ‘sense making’.

I have undoubtedly grown up and through the knowledge age. I was (and still am) a knowledge worker so the question for me is to what extent I am also part of the social age. As I look back over the last twenty years I can see that many of the roles I had involved co-creating knowledge in a social way. The basic social technology tools I used (and still use) is email, either in the form of an open mail list or in the form of surveys. More recently I have orchestrated on-line questionnaire surveys or posted questions in LinkedIn Groups. I have a Facebook page but rarely use it but I do use twitter for disseminating ideas and work. I have barely begun to utilise the social technology tools that characterise the social age and perhaps I never will embrace them in the way that people who are now growing up in this age use them as if they are second nature. Perhaps I will always remain a knowledge worker operating in a social age without really making use of the many social technologies that grow day by day - only time will tell.