Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Decided to look at peer mentoring from another angle.

This morning I decided to look at peer mentoring from another angle before revisiting the next phase of my research, the topic of  how peer mentoring benefits education establishments and when I talk about education establishment I am not restricting this to higher education, but Corporate Universities and Learning and Development departments. 


In an earlier post I elude to the idea that peer mentoring adds a social aspect to a course and with this in mind a posed a question to a community of Social Learning experts in the Social Learning Community I am a member of on Yammer. Much to my joy members have reacted to my post with likes, but also some comments. One of my followers suggested that I take some time to look at research from Professor Vivien Hodgson. Professor Hodgson  has written a lot about informal learning and networked learning over the years based on her experiences of running lots of peer-based virtual learning environments that support Lancaster's various masters programmes in management learning, leadership and HR. Google was open and I typed in her name + peer mentoring  and much to my joy there was a lot of great literature for me to wade through, which I will not share here, but the following links referencing her work a worth a read.
My posts to date  have concentrated on peer mentoring from a social aspects and I will certainly consider the theme of peer mentoring for learning after reading the above mentioned literature. 


It was interesting to read that one of the members is looking at introducing a peer mentoring scheme within his organisation and supporting this with SoMe (Social Media). I am always interested in ways in which Social Media can be used as a learning tool.  I was recently invited to join a chat on Google+, which is being used by too fellow cohorts on the same degree programme. One of the cohorts is using this tool to mentor the other cohort , which I thought just fantastic. I asked both of them if they are willing to be interviewed allowing me  to record their experiences as a mentor and mentee communicating through this medium.

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