Foreword

ONE AFTERNOON IN THE EARLY 1990s, I found myself at a meeting in my boss’s office when a computer-support guy showed up to demonstrate a new-fangled technology called instant messaging. I’d never seen IM before, but I was intrigued—so I volunteered for the demo.

My boss sat down in front of his computer. I stationed myself at another computer just outside the office. And away we went—typing and tapping a silent conversation in real time.

“Wow,” I shouted to the others back in the room. “Very cool.” And when I returned to the meeting, I offered—unsolicited, of course—my thoughts on what we’d just witnessed.

“This could be big,” I said. “Instant messaging is going to be incredibly useful for the hearing impaired, who can’t just pick up the phone and talk to someone. It’s not something most people will use much, but for that slice of the population it’s amazing.”

Today, more than two decades after instant messaging has become a part of everyday communication around the world—when literally tens of millions of people with perfectly good hearing are IM-ing right now—there’s a moral to this tale: Sometimes we miss the point.

That’s especially true of social technology. In business terms, most people—myself included—think of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media as tools for marketing. But now that I’ve read this smart and incisive book and its update, I realize that I was as wrong about that as I was about IM technology back in the early 1990s.

As authors Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner show, social media have already had an enduring impact on learning.

There’s a certain intuitive, forehead-slapping logic to that insight. Of course! In so many ways, learning is a fundamentally social act. From circle time in kindergarten, to study groups in college, to team projects in the workforce, sociability has always greased the gears of learning.

As this book shows, smart devices and software applications brought social technology into the workplace much faster than most people expected and made continual, far-reaching interactions part of everyday work. Employees now routinely use social tools to work and learn in tandem, to innovate, and to measure the impact of their work on customers.

The New Social Learning is a terrific guide to that emerging ecosystem. It will give you a set of core principles to help you navigate it. And with examples that range from firms such as LAZ Parking to Boston Children’s Hospital, National Australian Bank to pharmaceutical giant Sanofi Pasteur, and CENTURY 21 to Cigna, it will show you how social media can improve the way you recruit talent, engage employees, and build workforce capability.

Social learning isn’t a replacement for training and other forms of talent development. But it can accomplish what traditional approaches often cannot. For instance, it can supplement instruction with collaboration and co-creation and, in so doing, blur the boundary between the instructor and the instructed and enhance the experience of all. It can leave a “digital audit trail” that reveals the path of a learning journey and allows others to retrace it. It can re-energize your conferences and classes by providing a backchannel of feedback and questions.

It’s exciting when two of the most respected names in this arena come together again to update The New Social Learning. When you read this book and the impressive examples of organizations all over the world that have embraced social tools for better and more meaningful collaboration, you’ll understand how social learning has begun to transform the pursuit of knowledge and how it promises even greater things in the future.

But what you might realize most of all is that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and their newer social media kin that have come on to the scene in recent years aren’t all about marketing. They’re equally, if not more so, about how to get work done through better connection and collaboration with each other. This book helped me understand that and avoid missing the point of a new social tool once again. It can do the same for you.

Daniel H. Pink
Washington, D.C.
April 2015