by Alan Nelson
Last week I was at Online Information where I was presenting a seminar on the balance between information and learning in professional development. Ever since we established Nelson Croom it has been a central belief that we need to strike the right balance between information and learning. All our resources have both learning activities and resource centres of information, and the balance between them varies according to the profile of the learners, the content, and the objective of the programme.
What is interesting right now, however, is how Web 2.0 functionality is enabling us to integrate more effective collaboration and communication facilities within our professional development resources. These really draw the learners in and enable them to take ownership of the learning resources.
At the end of my presentation I asked for any questions and Duncan Crole put his hand up - Duncan runs e-learning international business development consultancy Bluedeep International.
“What,” Duncan wanted to know, “did I think that the impact of age is on the take up of social networking tools?”
I started to waffle through the standard answer that although we shouldn’t generalise, services like Bebo and Facebook are used very extensively by younger people, but then I stopped myself. I remembered a conversation I had recently with someone who focuses on providing resources to the “silver surfer”. He explained that while many older people were less confident about their use of the newer tools, they have more time available and given the right incentive to participate will do so in large numbers.
I also remembered that our technical director (don’t tell him I said this, but he isn’t that young either) uses the technical forums as a key resource to find people who have solved particular technology problems he faces. He wouldn’t give time to social networking for its own sake, but when it can help him with a particular professional problem he is a keen participant.
All of which makes me think that with the sort of professional communities that our work with professional bodies so frequently brings us into contact with, we should challenge our somewhat lazy assumptions about age and its impact on web usage.
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