Blogs are a great way to get learners actions on the job shared with other learners OR give them a place to ask questions that others can answer. Here are a few things to think about as you’re setting one up for training you’re planning.

Once, only teens and techies had blogs. Details from last night’s date and opinions about the latest video games filled these first Web-based logs, which started popping up around 1999. Today, more and more businesses are joining the blogging world. What began as a mere pastime has become a valuable promotional tool and internal communication vehicle for firms of all types and sizes, from small entrepreneurships to Fortune 500 giants. They’re a great way to build community with learners.

Think you can’t get your learners to blog what they’re doing with their learning? There’s built-in motivation for people to participate in blogging: They get credit for their ideas. A blog is essentially a repository of a person’s intellectual capital – a record of their thoughts, observations, contributions. Blogging is a way to protect the most important brand of all: themselves.

If you’re wondering what blogs look like, they’re essentially Web pages with some common characteristics: commentary, sometimes lengthy, but often only a sentence or paragraph per issue; hyperlink connections to other Web pages, discussion threads, a search-engine function, forms, software, people.

Weblogs can trigger a rich chain reaction of ideas and possibilities from others, which is why they hold such great potential for learner retention. Give individual employees within a company a weblog, encourage them to document their best ideas and personal experiences, link them, add search capabilities, and it’s easy to imagine that at least some innovation will arise from the ordinary. “Blogging is a train-of-thought technology,” says Scott Dinsdale, executive VP of digital strategy at the Motion Picture Association. The trick is to capitalize on the mental energy that’s unleashed by blogging.

Corporate cultures will need to change if blogging is to fulfill its promise as a tool for collaborative knowledge. There’s a “reluctance to open the floodgates of letting opinions fly around and not be able to control that,” Andy Chen, a blogger, says. Good point. There’s little reason to invest in this democratizing application if strict authority remains the status quo. On the other hand, companies that blog need to be prepared for the bad ideas, disagreements, and general dissonance that might also be generated by the system. “If there’s anything blogs aren’t, it’s succinct and direct,” says Dinsdale. The down side of blogging for knowledge management/learner retention would be this: hours wasted recording, reading, and responding to low-value meanderings. There’s a risk of getting bogged down in blogs.

Some of the best ideas for making blogs successful places to capture ideas are found in a few blogs on blogging.  You can learn more about blogs for reinforcing learning by participating in a blog yourself: K-Logs discussion group. Email discussion group that discussions klogging for KM. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/klogs 

Excerpts from Rotarian Magazine 11/07 and Information Week

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Training, Training Systems, Collaborative Learning, Training 2.0