The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations through Social Media [Paperback]

If your profession is learning and development, The New Social Learning is a must read.

Even if you are one of those people who are suspicious of social media or one who thinks social networking is a place for wasting time or if you think Twitter is a place where people tell you what they are eating for lunch, you will read the book and understand exactly how social learning is a new imperative for how we enable organizational learning. You will find this book to be a practical guide to implementing social learning in your organization.

At the end of each chapter, there is a list of common objections and how to overcome them. I found this to be the most useful part of the book. Just like a sales person needs to overcome objections from prospects, any organizational leader who intends to implement a new thing, must prepare for the inevitable objections that arise from the skeptics and curmudgeons. And there will be many. The list of objections and the ways to overcome them are, by themselves, worth the cost of your time to read this book.

The other idea that I infer this book is that people will learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it despite our best efforts to design and deliver training. Too many L&D professionals are hung up on the need to control the instructional design and training delivery process, believing that people simply do not learn properly, unless proper instruction is used in proper training delivery. Well this book is one step in the direction of proving that idea wrong. Our job is to not deliver instruction, but to enable people to learn what they need to learn to get their jobs done now.

Although the New Social Learning does not propose that instructional design and classroom training will be replaced (far from it), Tony and Marcia weave tales of company's that are using various elements of social and collaboration technologies to enable people to learn and most importantly grow and improve job performance....which is what this is all about in the first place.

It is well known that social media are good for keeping in touch with friends, networking with business contacts, disseminating your opinions, sharing embarrassing photos, and wasting idle time. However, they can also be important tools in the field of collaborative learning, according to Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner in this book.

Social learning, the authors say, is learning with and from others. It occurs at conferences, in discussion groups, and over tables in the café. Now, with social media tools, it can happen over Twitter, via Facebook, or through the agency of a myriad of other tools, in a manner unconstrained by geography or time differences. The book goes on to describe a number of examples of companies implementing virtual communities which have enabled connections and sharing between people who would never have been able to connect without social media tools.

Notwithstanding the various examples given, I still wonder whether most organisations can be "transformed" through social media as promised in the subtitle of the book. Social media certainly facilitate connections in very large organisations, but I am less persuaded by the use of Twitter as a serious learning tool. Video is undoubtedly a powerful teaching tool, but video is not necessarily "social media". On the other hand, immersive "Second Life" type environments seem to have enormous potential as interactive learning environments. I would recommend this book to anyone involved in workplace training.

The NEW Social Learning (@newsociallearn) is a guide to creating your own "community of learners" by embracing and integrating social and mobile tools in the training and learning process.

This book offers real examples and guidelines in how to implement engagement, listening skills, and most importantly, how to build collective intelligence from within and outside of your organization's silo.

Some professions are ahead of the curve (marketing pros and educators come to mind), but there are many cubicle centers and manufacturing mobs, retailers and customer service sectors who are keeping their blinders on tight, doing training like it's still 1989.

The NEW Social Learning can assist in a transformation that makes sense and creates a learning environment that makes meaning.

Whether the boardroom or the classroom, this book should be in your hands and under your yellow highlighter - and definitely part of your organizations training & development curriculum.