In the cafe session at the L&SG conference I mentioned that I don't talk about "social networking" with my clients in organisations - well not until/unless they are comfortable with the term since they often automatically assume I am talking about Facebook. I tend refer to social learning as the "use of social media for learning" and talk about "social media platforms" rather than "social networking pllatforms"?
One of the participants in the Elgg workshop I ran, mentioned that she talked about building a Learning Network - and kept away from the "social" word completely.
Keith Quinn in a reply to the discussion topic on technology choices, wrote "To ease their introduction, we have even avoided the terms "wiki" and "blog" - referring to them as the "Knowledge Bank" and "Project Diaries" respectively. This has certainly assisted in their acceptance by the less tech savvy staff in the organisation."
What terms do you use to describe social activities or tools to help drive acceptance or understanding of their use in your organisation?
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Within our field of Learning Technology we suffer a lot from impenetrable jargon that is at best ill-defined, at worst misleading and confusing to most people. Giving things meaningful, understandable names is difficult and a task most often underestimated. But it makes a huge difference to your target audience.
As a general suggestion, I would always try and keep the name of any "platform" or "content" or "tool" focused on the problem it attempts to solve. This may indeed mean giving it different (but related) names for different audiences.
If you think of this as more of a branding exercise, you get closer to coming up with something that will resonate with your staff and encourage usage.
Would be interested in other's experiences/war stories in this area.
I think Barry's suggestion of 'collaborative web sites' is a good one. In many clients, I tend to avoid the terms 'social media' as much as I do 'social networking'. Social is just not a word that fits easily in many organisations' mindsets.
Having said that, I disagree with Barry about the distinction in social and professional. Social isn't the opposite of professional ie being about leisure. It's about relationships, and it's important that organisations do understand that relationships are important (in business as well as leisure) and are something that need to be managed, or at least enabled.
So although I avoid the 'social' tag to start with, at an appropriate point, it's something I would want to have a conversation about.
The benefits gained from developing comfort with the word 'social. and from understanding that business is social, and that therefore people need to be managed in a rather different way (eg in Jay's complex vs mechanical perspective), may actually be greater than those of introducing a more social approach to learning (with or without this terminology).
I do tend bring the term 'social' in from the start of any conversation, just because for me that's the key element of these tools. The risk of dressing them up as something else is that you dilute their effectiveness by straightjacketing them with a typical set of corporate rules and regulations.
That said, I rarely use the term 'social networking', simply because that's not what I think these platforms offer to organisations, or individuals for that matter. Whether you're talking about this site, Facebook, LinkedIn or anything else they're all networks - whether the network itself is social or professional depends on how you use it. For me the 'social' is about how we interact not why we interact, and that's as true offline as online.
I'm definitely with Keith on using more human friendly names for the technologies. 'Collaborative web site' usually makes way more sense to people than 'wiki'!
Replies
Within our field of Learning Technology we suffer a lot from impenetrable jargon that is at best ill-defined, at worst misleading and confusing to most people. Giving things meaningful, understandable names is difficult and a task most often underestimated. But it makes a huge difference to your target audience.
As a general suggestion, I would always try and keep the name of any "platform" or "content" or "tool" focused on the problem it attempts to solve. This may indeed mean giving it different (but related) names for different audiences.
If you think of this as more of a branding exercise, you get closer to coming up with something that will resonate with your staff and encourage usage.
Would be interested in other's experiences/war stories in this area.
Having said that, I disagree with Barry about the distinction in social and professional. Social isn't the opposite of professional ie being about leisure. It's about relationships, and it's important that organisations do understand that relationships are important (in business as well as leisure) and are something that need to be managed, or at least enabled.
So although I avoid the 'social' tag to start with, at an appropriate point, it's something I would want to have a conversation about.
The benefits gained from developing comfort with the word 'social. and from understanding that business is social, and that therefore people need to be managed in a rather different way (eg in Jay's complex vs mechanical perspective), may actually be greater than those of introducing a more social approach to learning (with or without this terminology).
That said, I rarely use the term 'social networking', simply because that's not what I think these platforms offer to organisations, or individuals for that matter. Whether you're talking about this site, Facebook, LinkedIn or anything else they're all networks - whether the network itself is social or professional depends on how you use it. For me the 'social' is about how we interact not why we interact, and that's as true offline as online.
I'm definitely with Keith on using more human friendly names for the technologies. 'Collaborative web site' usually makes way more sense to people than 'wiki'!