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Informal learning - by definition – requires a learner to set his or her own goals and to monitor progress toward those goals.

So the next step in the learning process is for the learner to come up with some kind of strategy for learning

A good coach pushes a learner to set challenging goals and to define clear strategies for meeting them.

A good coach sometimes teaches and often provides feedback on progress.  A good coach asks tough questions to help a learner reflect on and apply learning.  And a good coach applauds progress and takes some pride in the coachee’s accomplishments.

Who are these coaches?

 For workplace learning

the coach-learner relationship

we are all responsible for our own learning, including finding (or being) our own learning coach.

I hope I can be both a better learning coach and a better self-directed learner.

These are the workers who will be your new supervisors and managers

workers in their 20s and 30s expect to be able to use the latest IT applications in their workplace. They are used to social networking online, and to online learning, often preferring these to classroom instruction

In addition, this also will encourage open communication between companies, employers, HR departments, owners, and managers.” 

Without appropriate technology tools and resources available in their work environment, they may look for help from non-work related services such as Facebook.com. Integrating social media into the development environment eliminates this potential challenge and at the same time increases the potential for success of the development effort and of the new managers. 

Can social networking provide a practical way to help prepare new managers for their duties? Considering the rapid growth of social networking adoption among younger workers, this is a question well worth asking

Creating a curriculum for training new managers and supervisors is a common task that falls to instructional designers

The typical approach for many decades has consisted of a combination of classroom events, each lasting from one to five days (or more). This default design has many problems, including travel expense and time away from the job for the managers. Not infrequently, there are severe mismatches between what is taught and the actual practices supported by the organization’s culture.

There is an increasing number of companies and online service providers who are convinced that social networking can help overcome at least some of the issues common to the classroom-only approach

By combining formal classroom instruction and online reference and performance support with online coaching, mentoring, and informal learning through social networking, a new manager can gain a solid theory foundation, just-in-time help, and culturally correct application pointers.

Informal learning, as an object of attention by researchers, is not a new topic. However, it only appeared on the radar screens of instructional designers less than ten years ago. The emergence of online social media has led to the notion of somehow tapping into the potential of this channel, that carries so much of the real learning that goes on in organizations.

In our current age, we have plenty of channels in which informal learning can take place: everything from microblogs (Twitter), to communities (LinkedIn Groups, discussion forums), to user-created content (wikis, Weblogs, YouTube), to social bookmarking (Delicious), and surely more to come.

But we also have plenty of examples of attempts at use of these channels in which the attempts failed. The virtual landscape is littered with the remains of abandoned wikis, content-less and comment-less Weblogs, and LinkedIn Groups where the spam has driven out the discussion and all but eliminated any possibility of learning.

Existing informal learning groups online include a surprising variety of formats

Jay Cross’ Internet Time Community,

Participants in the Twitter #lrnchat sessions also comprise an ongoing informal learning group

if informal learning is going to take place online, it must be self-sustaining

Focus

Focus