Tiedon jakaminen oppimisen tukena verkkoyhteisöissä

Abstract

Working in the digitally networked world has become more complex and dynamic. We need new ways of learning in order to adapt information and knowledge surrounding us. Our information seeking and media habits are relying heavily on web-supported services. Informal and networked work has become as important as the formal work. Social media has become the center of communities where projects, learning, collaboration, information sharing and training are created. Social media engages employees to capture and share knowledge in ways that has not been possible before with formal learning. Web has also become a learning environment where understanding is socially shared. The place where learning is shared also creates usually new knowledge. Knowledge creation in organization can be seen as a continuous and dynamic process, where tacit knowledge is the most valuable competitive asset of an organization.

Social web enables new ways of learning and knowledge creation for the entire organization and future employee generations. The main goal of this research is to research how quality criteria of learning in social network is achieved and potentially adapted to organizations. Learning in a company has shifted more towards situated learning were communication cannot be necessary done physically between employees. The benefits of using online learning are for example increased access, more learner centralized processes, better decision-making and cost-effectiveness. New technologies and the need for globalization are quickly making distributed communities of practice a standard practice of a learning organization. Online communities have become global and the physical distance between community learners is not that crucial anymore.

The focus of this research is to find out how an organization uses social media in their internal learning purposes like keeping up to date with industry, organizational networking, team collaboration and social training. Online communities with social networking can be seen as modern day communities of practice. Social networking provides multiple ways of collaborating in synchronous and asynchronous processes. It supports keeping information current, creates systems that support updates and sharing of collective perspectives. Emerging web technologies in communities allow us to create dialogues inside and outside the community. Google+ social networking service is one of the few social networking services that support versatile communications and potentially variety different learning ways. Google has been the most dominant player of the most popular Internet services. Google+ is a new social networking service, which provides a variety of tools for collaboration, good usability, and different connections methods with a social environment. It also builds a network where knowledge sharing is easily encouraged between users and groups of people.

The amount of information is overwhelming for individual learners to adopt and process. For information seeking, problem solving and understanding complexity we need collaborative tools to support our ways of learning. Lack of recognizing the change in learning and learning environments can lead to bad decisions and inefficient processes. Online learning can enable and make information spread effectively by recommendations, automatic preferences, community tools and information filters. All of the above help learners to focus on the most crucial and specified information needed for succeeding in every day work. Social networking for learning purposes and its internal organizational use has been used and researched limitedly. This research seeks to apply a conceptual framework of learning organization concept. After describing the concept I will qualitatively test Google + social network’s suitability for supporting learning in organizational setting and draw an assessment based on these results. This thesis work is an interdisciplinary research representing theories and practices from pedagogy, psychology, sociology, economics and technology.