The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner is a good book. It does exactly what it purports to do — provide a comprehensive guide to social learning. It’s one of those books that is going to become a must-have for learning folks — for the next couple years anyways before it all changes again. But by then, perhaps they will have built it into a franchise, bringing out a new book every year.

This book covers: workplace trends, online communities, making the case for social learning, micro-sharing (aka twitter and Facebook), collective intelligence (wikis, blogging), immersive environments, and blended learning.

Good points: it’s easy to read, it has nice tidbits (“Microsharing is an serendipity engine”, p.98). I can easily imagine it as a reference when making a game-plan for social learning in your workplace. A great place to start if you’re learning about social learning.

Downside: It didn’t inspire me. Perhaps it’s just me — I’m familiar with most of the stuff in the book and I’m looking for something else. It talks about nuts and bolts, and it has quotes from people who implement, people who manage it, there are many interesting stories, but not compelling stories. I wanted to hear more about how that small group of guys changed the culture of the CIA, FBI and the rest of the intelligence community and got them to use social media.

If you’re working at the intersection of social media and learning, you need this book in your shelf. End of story. So I’ll make it easy: here is where you can buy it. And don’t worry, I don’t get a cut, not even through Google ads.

But if you’re looking for the in-depth story of how social media creates cultural change in organizations, you won’t find it here.

Check out the New Social Learning website for more info.

Maybe not the shortest book review ever, but close.

The main questions I’m trying to answer is “What is twitter?” and “Why should I bother?” My interest in this introduction is not to get into branding, or social media marketing, or any of that. It’s really a reflection on why I got interested in twitter, and why you might find it interesting too. It was also to dispel the myth that twitter is just about gossip — because it’s not (though that is a large part of what goes on I must say.)

This also gave me to the opportunity to add to my portfolio and was a warm up exercise to get me motivated to do that learning thing I want to do about wine, which, you know, I’m getting to.

For you viewing pleasure, a slidecast. No complex builds because Slideshare doesn’t allow for that.

Quick analysis – I thought I’d be able to see trends or topics – and not have to read the transcripts. Not so obvious. The experts are the most retweeted – or is it those with the strongest network ties? — that’s probably closer to it. So for your viewing pleasure.

#lrnchat - Oct 15, 2009

#lrnchat - Oct 22, 2009

#lrnchat - Nov 5, 2009

Three things on shifting your audience & leadership:

• Create the time to play with the media
  • I left my job. I had time to play. I really didn’t want to get engaged in social media but felt like I should. At my previous job, we had tried to play with social media within the organization but it was a limited closed circuit. What we should have done, is played with social media in the world wide web — where it’s more dynamic, where you can participate in existing communities.
  • Informal company communications - I wish Twitter was more popular before I had left my job. It’s the one way I can imagine people on different floors keeping up with each other (cross-floor communication became an issue). It would have closed the physical space that opened up after we moved to new offices and the informal chatter lessened. It would have decreased the space between offices in NY, Durham, London. Or people offsite communicating how a client program is going (For example, I could have really used Twitter the time when our a video got held at Canadian Customs and my boss got held at Immigration — I felt very alone.) Twitter would have improved informal communications within our organization. These are spaces where  Twitter can play and help people do their jobs.
  • It depends in part on the type of work and group dynamics of your organization.
• Provide constraints – let them ease into it
  • There is one thing that got my into social media through blogging: it was Karl Kapp’s line “every learning professional should blog, if only for a month”. Blogging for a month — that I could do. I was participating in Work Literacy in Fall of 2008. I started to blog and it changed my connection to my work and opened up a community of support. Every learning professional should blog — about something they care about — if only for a month.
  • Others should be asked to comment on your blog — only for a month.
  • Rotate the blog contributors — so they each do it for a month.
  • Maybe  monthly/weekly team reports should be done on a blog.
  • Tweet once a day to a community of practice such as #lrnchat, #astd, #dl09, #learntrends – and follow the conversations/hashtags for that community to see if one learns anything new.
• Get influencers within the resistant cohort and/or leadership
  • I remember trying to teach Second Life (SL)to senior executives. The one question I always got was “Why should we bother, it’s not real.” So I positioned the economy of SL and other virtual worlds as emerging economies. How large (in USD) are these economies? Is this a place where you want to have a presence? How do you regulate in this emerging economy? What are the opportunities? Risks? Are you clients here? (That one always got them.) Are your staff here?
  • Teaching social media to leadership or anyone in the company I would ask similar questions. Social media is in part a reputation/branding engine. What are people saying about your company? Your brand? Are your staff here? Are your clients or customers here? Don’t tell them all, let them discover most of the answers for themselves. Call it research, call it discovery learning.
  • Examine those places that we don’t usually think of as social media — Amazon, photo sharing sites, Yelp, Ning, Delicious. I thought because I didn’t participate in Blogs, Facebook, Twtitter, LinkedIn that I wasn’t on social media. Not true
  • The harder thing to do is find measurements of social media learning that matter to your organization. Is there a pain point you can link social media to (customer complaints, etc.)? Is there a way you can measure the impact of social media?

Social media is a way for the learning department to have an impact beyond just learning and link it to the organization as a whole. It’s informal.

Just some thoughts.