You’ll like this!

By Michiel Klønhammer, Chief of Things at LearningStone

We have just released likes for LearningStone. From now on trainees and coachees can like wall posts, dialogues, documents and images in the galleries. Why not use this new engagement driver as part of your next blended learning course? You like?

So why use likes?

In general clicking on likes can raise engagement. It really helps if the trainer or coach actually tell the participants why they should “like”  things in your learning environment. As with all collaborative features, trainers and coaches should give direction and set goals. We’ve added both “Given” and “Received” like-counters to the progress reports, so you can even check if participants are using the feature and in what way.

To like or not to like

Likes have been turned on for your LearningStone workspace. The default like icon is the trustworthy “Thumbs up”.

What if you don’t want likes? Or you think the “Thumbs up” icon is boring. Just head over to the Workspace settings and disable liking, change the colors or the icon it self for the whole workspace. If you have an individual groupspace that needs to be different from the rest, you can overrule the workspace settings in the groupspace settings.

Likes in action

Likes can be found on the Wall for posts and for reactions to posts, for Dialogues and for Docs and Gallerie images. Likes appear next to a Docs document such as a word file or video. The like icon at the top is the main like counter. The small like counters are for the individual comments.

You’ll notice both like counters and counters for written comments show up in the list-views of Docs, Galleries and Dialogues. These counters only show the amount of main Likes, not of the sub-comments. Lost? Just go check it out and we hope that you will eh… like it :-)

We would like to thank….

We would like to thank two women for their impact!
Jeanne Bakker - guru trainer and LearningStone power user - for consistently asking us to implement this for more than 18 months. Jeanne has been running large (300+) learning communities for clients and has put LearningStone to work in ways we didn’t know were possible. But she really needed likes to support her vision on social learning. 

Fay, 13 year old daughter of one of the founders, who dropped by the office when were were thinking about likes. Fay spends quite a bit of her time on social media (as young girls do) and had some brilliant insights into the world of likes.

We took their needs and their idea’s to the design table and developed an architecture that would not only stimulate engagement but also form a starting point for future developments.