You Are Already Learning. You Just Have Not Called It That Yet

 

You Are Already Learning. You Just Have Not Called It That Yet.

There is a particular kind of learning that happens in the margins of a professional day. A LinkedIn post that reframes a problem you have been stuck on. A thread you stumbled across that names a practice you have been doing intuitively without a vocabulary for it. A comment from someone in a different field that makes you see your own work differently. Most professionals would not call any of that learning. They would call it scrolling.

Muljana and Luo (2023) would call it something more precise: self-regulated professional learning through social media. And their work made me look at my own LinkedIn habits with considerably more attention than I usually give them.

The Structure Beneath the Scroll

What Muljana and Luo found in studying how instructional designers use social media for professional development is that the most effective learners are not consuming content randomly. They are applying self-regulation strategies, setting goals for what they want to know, monitoring their own understanding as they engage with content, and reflecting on how new information connects to their existing practice. The platform is almost incidental. What matters is the intentionality the learner brings to it.

This landed for me because it describes something I recognize in my own behavior but have rarely examined deliberately. When I go on LinkedIn, I am not always there to post. Sometimes I am there to learn. I follow researchers whose work I want to stay current with. I read comment threads on posts about AI in education not because I plan to respond but because the discourse tells me where the field is, what questions practitioners are wrestling with, and where my own work fits into a larger conversation. That is goal-directed behavior. It is just dressed up as casual browsing.

The Instructional Designer as Self-Directed Learner

What makes Muljana and Luo's study particularly relevant is their focus on instructional designers specifically, a professional group that spends considerable energy designing learning experiences for others while often navigating their own professional development informally and without institutional support. The irony is not lost on me. The people best equipped to design structured learning pathways frequently rely on the most unstructured methods to keep their own skills current.

In my own work at FSU's Office of Digital Learning, I occupy a version of that same tension. I design AI learning experiences for faculty while simultaneously learning about AI adoption, pedagogy, and instructional technology through a combination of formal coursework, hands-on practice, and the kind of networked informal learning that Muljana and Luo describe. The coursework gives me theory. The practice gives me feedback. But LinkedIn and the communities I have built there give me something neither of those sources can fully provide: a real-time read on where the field is moving and who is doing the most interesting work in it.

What Self-Regulation Actually Looks Like in Practice

The self-regulation strategies Muljana and Luo identify are worth naming concretely because they are easy to practice without recognizing them as strategies at all. Goal setting looks like following specific hashtags or creators because they consistently produce content relevant to a learning objective you have identified. Self-monitoring looks like pausing on a post that challenges your current understanding and sitting with the discomfort rather than scrolling past it. Reflection looks like the blog post I am writing right now, taking something I encountered in a reading and asking what it means for how I actually work.

The gap between a professional who scrolls and a professional who learns through social media is not a gap in time spent or platforms used. It is a gap in intentionality. The same thirty minutes on LinkedIn can produce very different outcomes depending on whether the person has a sense of what they are looking for and why.

Designing for Professional Learning Communities

The implication for design is significant. If we want social media to function as a genuine professional learning environment rather than a content consumption channel, we need to build in the conditions that support self-regulation. That means helping community members articulate what they are trying to learn, creating structures for reflection and sense-making rather than just sharing, and designing interactions that push participants to connect new information to their existing practice rather than simply accumulating it.

This is what I am trying to build into the AI Sparks pilot at FSU. The goal is not to expose faculty to AI tools and hope learning happens. It is to design an experience where faculty can set their own learning goals, engage with content and peers in ways that challenge their current practice, and reflect on what they are building and why. Muljana and Luo's work affirms that the self-regulation piece is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a community that learns together and one that simply occupies the same digital space.

How intentional are you about your own professional learning on social media? Do you have strategies for turning browsing into something more purposeful? I would love to hear what works for you.

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