Review (Guest): The New Social Learning–A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Communications, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Information Society, Intelligence (Commercial)
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Phi Beta Iota: two reviews are provided, one from the blogsphere (Tip of the Hat to Pierre Levy at LinkedIn, and one from Amazon.  If not obvious, this new trend in organizational learning assures that “secret” organizations will get dumber and dumber as time goes by.

Authors:  Tony Bingham and Marcia Connor

I (Bill Ives) was very pleased to receive a review copy of The New Social Learning by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner. Tony is President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD). Marcia is a Partner at Altimeter Group, founder of the Twitter chat #lrnchat, and writes the Fast Company column “Learn at All Levels.”

Getting a chance to read this timely work excited me for several reasons. First, I began my consulting career in the learning space in the 80s and have remained convinced of its importance for accelerating business performance. I presented at several ASTD session during this period. Second, Marcia was also a colleague of mine at Pistachio Consulting where we did some projects together. I had a chance to review an earlier version of one of the chapters of this book. But most importantly, it is the first book I have seen to help organizations understand and harness the huge workplace learning potential of social media and enterprise 2.0.

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Journal: Cheery Waves Flags ‘Terrorist Facebook’ – the new weapon against al-Qa’ida

09 Terrorism, Methods & Process
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Social networking is not just for the MySpace generation. Intelligence agencies are adopting a controversial new technique to identify terrorist masterminds

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

Wednesday, 19 August 2009

Intelligence agencies are building up a Facebook-style databank of international terrorists in order to sift through it with complex computer programs aimed at identifying key figures and predicting terrorist attacks before they happen.

By analysing the social networks that exist between known terrorists, suspects and even innocent bystanders arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, military intelligence chiefs hope to open a new front in their “war on terror”.

The idea is to amass huge quantities of intelligence data on people – no matter how obscure or irrelevant – and feed it into computers that are programmed to make associations and connections that would otherwise be missed by human agents, scientists said.

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