School,
Effort, and
Play.
Trying your best
Each hour of the day,
Making new friends,
Being good as you can
Exciting discoveries,
Reading books with a friend."
-  Boni Fulgham  

September was social learning month on TrainingZone; This is a subject that will remain fully on the radar of the world of L&D for a long time to come, as Josh Bersin opined recently. With the continued emphasis on budget and ROI, social learning has been many employers' ways of co-opting social networks such as Twitter, Facebook etc. For the cynical, you could see the move towards social learning to be a defeatist trend; employers figured 'our staff are going to use facebook at work, so why don't we integrate our training schemes with social networks too?', but it's morely likely to be viewed by most as a move of timely opportunism. If this is how people connect with each other, why not extend this to the workplace?

The Internet Time Alliance kicked off a fantastic series of articles that looked at social learning from historical, technological and anthropological viewpoints as well as sociological. Matt Pierce showed us a technique called flipped training, and Robin Hoyle concluded his articles on bad elearning. But it wasn't all about social networks as we found out with more leftfield perspectives on the leadership debate and its musical parallels. Nice.

Here's to a prosperous September 2011.