by Jacqui Nelson
At the recent Members 2008 exhibition, I attended a session by Jude Habib on Social Networking and Web 2.0. The discussion moved, to once you have the tools in place, how do you get your audience to engage and enter into a dialogue with you and each other? This caused one guy to ask what you do if someone says something that’s not very complementary about you or your organisation on a blog or discussion site.
As far as I’m concerned it is a risk that is well worth taking. Swearing and other rudeness aside, we have to get used, in the world of Web 2.0, to getting feedback both good and bad.
Jude’s answer was exactly as mine would have been. If people have something bad to say about you or your organisation, you can’t stop them saying it. So surely it is better to have them say it so you can hear it and deal with it, rather then saying it behind your back.
There is a relevance to what we do at Nelson Croom. In all our programmes we have what I call ‘marmite’ features. You either love ‘em or you hate ‘em. One such feature is the ‘view other learners answers’ button. It is optional so you can turn it on or off but to my mind it is a great feature. It appears on scenario based activities where there is some judgement required, and it allows learners, once they have answered a question, to see, anonymously, what their fellow learners have answered.
It has many benefits; it makes people feel less isolated, it gives them different perspectives on a topic, it gives them a reason to give an answer … I could go on.
I was with a client not too long ago who is desperate to get his learners to submit more into the course so they can gather real stories. I suggested turning on this feature to encourage a better rate of responses but the client was dead set against it because it might spread bad practice. I conceded, of course but disagree with the decision. It would be a great way of getting more responses and if people did enter best practice at least then the client could deal with that and correct it. At the moment they just don’t know what’s happening.
I make one concession to this argument. When it comes to compliance training it seems to me that it is important not to blur the issues but to make things very black and white. There is clearly a right and a wrong way to act and so perhaps finding out what your colleagues think isn’t as useful as finding out the RIGHT way.
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