What Is the New Social Learning?

To understand social learning, we must first understand social media. Social media is a set of Internet-based technologies designed to be used by three or more people. It's rarer than it sounds. Most interaction supported by technology is narrowcast (one-to-one), often with a telephone call or an email message; niche-cast (one-to-small groups), for instance using email distribution lists or small-circulation newsletters; or broadcast (one-to-many), as in large-scale online magazines or a radio show.

Social learning is what it sounds like - learning with and from others. It has been around for a long time and naturally occurs at conferences, in groups, and among old friends in a caf as easily as it does in classroom exercises or among colleagues online who have never met in person. We experience it when we go down the hall to ask a question and when we post that same question on Twitter anticipating that someone will respond. While social media is technology used to engage three or more people and social learning is participating with others to make sense of new ideas, what's new is how powerfully they work together. Social tools leave a digital audit trail, documenting our learning journey - often an unfolding story - and leaving a path for others to follow.

Tools are now available to facilitate social learning that is unconstrained by geographic differences (spatial boundaries) or time-zone differences (temporal boundaries) among team members.

The new social learning reframes social media from a marketing strategy to a strategy that encourages knowledge transfer and connects people in a way consistent with how we naturally interact. It is not a delivery system analogous to classroom training, mobile learning, or e-learning. Instead it's a powerful approach to sharing and discovering a whole array of options - some of which we may not even know we need - leading to more informed decision making and a more intimate, expansive, and dynamic understanding of the culture and context in which we work.

The new social learning provides people at every level, in every nook of the organization and every corner of the globe, a way to reclaim their natural capacity to learn nonstop. Social learning can help the pilot fly more safely, the saleswoman be more persuasive, and the doctor keep up-to-date.

The 36,000-foot view

For a long time, many of us have known learning could transform the workplace. We longed for tools to catch up with that potential. Only recently have changes in corporate culture and technology allowed this eventuality to unfold.

Clay Shirky, who writes about web economics and teaches new media at New York University and author of Cognitive Surplus, points out, "Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table."

At its most basic level, new social learning can result in people becoming more informed, gaining a wider perspective, and being able to make better decisions by engaging with others. It acknowledges that learning happens with and through other people, as a matter of participating in a community, not just by acquiring knowledge.

Social learning happens using social media tools and through extended access and conversations with all our connections - in our workplaces, our communities, and online. It happens when we keep the conversation going on a blog rich with comments, through coaching and mentoring, or even during a workout at the gym.

Social learning is augmented by commercial tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and wikis, and with enterprise applications and suites of applications including Socialtext, Socialcast, Newsgator, and Lotus Connections. With some custom development, learning also can grow on enterprise social platforms such as IBM WebSphere Portal Server, Microsoft Sharepoint, SAP Netweaver Portal and Collaboration, and Oracle's Beehive.

Don't conclude this is all new, though. Social software has been around for almost 50 years, dating back to the Plato bulletin board system. Networks such as Compuserve, Usenet, discussion boards, and The Well were around before the founder of Facebook was even born. Only technology enthusiasts used those systems, though, because of clunky interfaces that didn't readily surface or socialize the best ideas.

The new social learning is enabled by easy-to-use, socially focused, and commercially available "Web 2.0" tools and "Enterprise 2.0" software that move services, assets, smarts, and guidance closer to where they are needed - to people seeking answers, solving problems, overcoming uncertainty, and improving how they work.

They facilitate collaboration and inform choices on a wide stage, fostering learning from a vast, intellectually diverse set of people. These new social tools augment training, knowledge management, and communications practices used today. They can introduce new variables that can fundamentally change getting up to speed, provide a venue to share spontaneously developed resources as easily as finely polished documents, and draw in departments that previously hadn't considered themselves responsible for employee development at all.

Social tools are powerful building blocks that can transform the way we enable learning and development in organizations. They foster a new culture of sharing, one in which content is contributed and distributed with few restrictions or costs.

Most of what we learn at work and elsewhere comes from engaging in networks where people co-create, collaborate, and share knowledge, fully participating and actively engaging, driving, and guiding their learning through whatever topics will help them improve. Training often gives people solutions to problems already solved. Collaboration addresses challenges no one has overcome before.

The new social learning makes that immediate, enabling people to easily interact with those with whom they share a workplace, a passion, a curiosity, a skill, or a need.

What it's not

Another way to think about the new social learning is to compare it with what it is not.

The new social learning is not just for knowledge workers. It can empower people who work on shop floors, backstage, on the phone, behind retail counters, and on the battlefield. It is not your corporate intranet, although features of social learning may be included there. Document management, calendaring, blogs, and online directories may contribute to learning socially, but they are often task oriented rather than community oriented.

It's not at odds with formal education. Students often use Twitter as a back channel for communicating among themselves or with instructors. Teachers can also use social media before and after classes to capture and share everyone's ideas.

It's not a replacement for training or employee development. Training is well suited for compliance, deep learning, and credentialing. Formal development programs are still needed to prepare employees to progress through the organization. Social learning can supplement training and development in the classroom or online. It complements training and covers knowledge that formal training is rarely able to provide.

It's not synonymous with informal learning, a term often used to describe anything that's not learned in a formal program or class. The broad category of informal learning can include social learning, but some instances of informal learning are not social - for example, search and reading.

It's not a new interface for online search, which could only be considered social because other people developed the content you discover. Finding content with a search engine does not involve interpersonal engagement - a hallmark of social learning. It's not the same as e-learning, the term used to describe any use of technology to teach something intentionally. That broad category can include social tools and, if it's organized using an online learning community such as Moodle, can be quite communal.

It's not constantly social in the same way a party is. Often people are alone when they are engaged and learning through social tools. The socialness refers to the way interaction happens: intermingling ideas, information, and experiences, resulting in something more potent than any individual contribution.

Note: This article is excerpted from The New Social Learning by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner.

Tony Bingham is the president and CEO of ASTD. Together with the board of directors and supported by a staff of 90 and a wide volunteer network, Bingham is focused on helping members lead talent management in their organizations, demonstrate positive business impact, understand the power of social media on informal learning, close skills gaps, and connect their work to the strategic priorities of business. Bingham co-authored Presenting Learning: Ensure CEOs Get the Value of Learning, a book to help learning professionals articulate the business case for learning more persuasively, position themselves as a strategic partner, and communicate a compelling story about the impact of learning on business results.

Marcia Conner is a partner at Altimeter Group, a research-based advisory firm that helps companies at a crossroads tackle the world's toughest business challenges. Working with organizations and industries to leverage disruption to their advantage, she applies experience from across disciplines to accelerate collaborative culture, workplace learning, and social business. Conner is a fellow at the Darden School of Business, founder of the popular Twitter chat #lrnchat, and writes the Fast Company column "Learn at All Levels." A 20-year veteran of the enterprise market, Conner was vice president of education services and information futurist for PeopleSoft, senior manager of worldwide training at Microsoft, editor in chief of Learning in the New Economy magazine, and a fellow of the Society for New Communications Research.

2010 ASTD, Alexandria, VA. All rights reserved.