The eLearning Forum is now the Emergent Learning Forum:

eLearning has reached adolescence. It has grown up and we elders have to let it get out of the house make its own friends. The action is moving from eLearning itself to what happens as its relationships with others. That why we added this plank to our mission: "Position learning as a core business process."

Emergence is what results when complex systems interact. It's up to us to mold Emergent Learning into a useful concept. My notion of Emergent Learning includes:

• Greater than the sum of its parts
• New arrangements of components
• Multidisciplinary
• Self-organizing
• Dynamic, evolving
• Often surprising
• Becoming, not established

The new Emergent Learning Forum recently had an event to talk about social networking, relationship capital, and expertise management

Our topic, the impact of social networks on corporate learning, perfectly fit the bill. Social network software is a relatively recent phenomenon, pundits and investors feel it is ready to take off, and very little consideration has been given to how it can improve the quality of learning.

More good stuff coming, I'm sure. Some of the issues of social networking are trust, privacy, how dynamic it is, how to make it useful place for everyone before everyone's using it, and other things. Integrating learning adds another level of participation with lots and lots of potential.