If you were present at the dawn of the e-learning era, talk about social learning may seem very familiar. Technology seems to be at the foundation of most of the discussions regarding social learning and informal learning as they relate to the enterprise. Experts and attendees of ASTD's International Conference & Exposition in May filled the rooms for several conference sessions to discuss and debate social media, social learning, and informal learning in general.

A panel featuring Tamar Elkeles, vice president of learning and organizational development at Qualcomm; Tracy Conn, assistant vice president and learning officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland; and Kurt Olson, director of capability solutions for Accenture, presented real world examples of informal learning uses in their organizations and offered advice and opinions. The panel discussion was led by Josh Bersin, president of Bersin & Associates.

"If you were around in about 2000, when e-learning took off, there was a notion that all the instructor-led learning was going to go away and it was all going to be replaced by the Internet," Bersin said in kicking off the presentation.

"That didn't happen, and what we found in the seven or eight years that followed was that true business solutions take place through formal training in combination of a lot of other things. But in our research, companies told us over and over that business problems they wanted to solve were not getting solved though traditional formal training."

The panelists discussed various kinds of informal learning and Bersin boiled them down to a list of three. "Ondemand is one kind of learning - what many people might call job aids," he noted. "If the copier is broken, do you really want to take a class in how to fix the copier? Of course not. You want to grab the little plastic laminated card and read through the steps on how to fix the problem. There are hundreds of examples of where ondemand learning can take over the job of formal training."

The panel spent a good deal of time discussing social learning, the second defined area of informal learning. "It isn't the sexiest topic, but it has been around since the beginning of training," suggested Bersin. "If you ever went to a class and spoke to the person next to you or during a breakout session, you were involved in social learning. It is not a new concept, but just a new set of technologies and a new scale to social learning. It can be done across the entire world."

The third example the panel offered was embedded learning. Those are the things that take place as part of a business or organization that you may have never thought about as being training, but they reinforce training or learning experiences - for example, an after-action review.

Qualcomm's Elkeles was quick to point out that "sometimes I think this formal (versus) informal learning things is a misnomer. What people do on the job - discovery learning - is what we should call informal learning."

But all panelists agreed that the terminology for much of informal and social learning is still being defined.

"You can create all the informal learning opportunities you want, but if your organization doesn't adopt them and embrace them, they won't work," explained Bersin. "The culture is a very important element. As you roll out informal learning, social learning, and social networking, you will find yourself involved in tools, systems, and programs. You will be getting involved in discussions with managers and leaders about the culture and about how we are rewarding people for sharing information or about how we are facilitating the discovery and discussion of mistakes. These all have a big impact on organizational learning that will either create opportunities within your formal program or perhaps hurt them. Companies that have strong learning cultures outperform those that don't. That may be intuitively obvious to training professionals, but when you look at companies that are failing in the market, usually there is a cultural problem behind the failure."

Learning has been around a long time, whether it is in the classroom or across the organization. But like the nature of work itself, the way people learn their jobs is changing as fast as the jobs themselves.

"Disruptive technologies are driving learning across organizations, as well as outside organizations," said Elkeles. "As we think about the employees coming into our companies, they are used to using very different ways of getting information and using very different ways to learn. Even though the academic systems are very much the same as they were a few years ago, these folks have figured out search engines and how to collaborate inside and outside the classroom. They can get information a lot quicker and a lot differently. And they can learn a lot differently. We have to become a facilitator of that learning. There are a lot of tools and technologies out there; some of them we don't even know about yet, but they are coming."

Added Elkeles: "I still believe there is still a role for the classroom, but it should be reserved for only three things: interaction with an expert, role-playing or experiential learning, and collaboration. Even though we want everything online, there is still a need for the classroom. But we need to be more creative about the classroom."

One area in which the classroom is vital, but is seldom used for that purpose, is in executive development - not just for the learning to take place, but for upper level management to observe how the participants learn.

Another concept discussed by the panel was braided learning. "Learning leaders need to think about designing learning that gives people both time to reflect, as well as the time to act," Elkeles explained. "A lot of what we do is fast cognitive learning - we want to do it fast and get the answer fast and move on. But we need to design learning that gives people time for reflection."

Accenture's Olson added, "We are under a lot of pressure to perform well for our clients, but what sometimes gets lost is the support for our people and their development. We have a very mobile workforce and one that can walk out the door very easily. We have to develop creative ways to support our people."