From our recent photo shoot
Nehemiah “Nemo” Chu joined Bloomfire two weeks ago, and we finally found a little bit of time to introduce him to you all. We only had the time to ask him one question; thankfully, he gave us a generous response.
Q. What brought you to Bloomfire?
Before I came to Bloomfire, I was with S. L. Robbins & Associates. Those of you who have been involved with diversity training may have heard of the founder of this company, Dr. Steve L. Robbins. He takes the work of diversity and reframes it as a topic that’s really about creativity and innovation. Our workshops would be filled with anecdotes about crowdsourcing, social media, and user-generated content from organizations such as YouTube, Netflix, and InnoCentive.
We worked with some of the most innovative organizations in the world: NASA, Boeing, and Herman Miller, to name a few. After being involved with various creativity and innovation workshops for these firms, I quickly realized that one of the best ways to ensure that our workshop materials would stick was for participants to immerse themselves in the topic and continue the conversation with each other after the workshops ended.
That made sense to me. I’m the kind of guy that learns about a topic from conversing with people in that area, and I find it helpful to “talk it out.” Conversations are like mini “collaborative learning” sessions; as I listen to Sally, I’m being taught by Sally, and when Sally listens to me, she’s being taught by me.
Great reporters are often great conversationalists, and they’ll employ this technique to get more out of interviews. You’ve probably seen this strategy at work before—after the interviewee makes a long statement, the reporter might summarize what she just heard and repeat it back. She’ll preface her summary with something like, “So, you’re saying that…”
Some experts call that technique “mirroring,” and in order for a reporter to pull that off successfully, she needs to cognitively work at grasping what she just heard. If she is cognitively working, chances are, she’s really engaged in the experience. I think every teacher wishes for that kind of engagement from her students. Imagine every student mirroring what the teacher just said, one statement at a time. I’d be willing to bet money that the learning would “stick.”
In an information economy, when a fire hose of data is flying by at 100 miles per hour, making things stick is more important than ever before.
It became apparent that some of the organizations we were working with were looking for a solution where employees could engage in collaborative learning for precisely that reason—making things stick. And collaborative learning takes many forms—some would say that mirroring is just one manifestation.
Some might say that sharing is another manifestation. Sharing is very popular right now—platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are capitalizing on the tendency for people to share what they’re eating, where they’re going, how they’re feeling, etc. Such “social” platforms are bending over backwards to make sharing easy; they want to make their authoring tools so easy that even Grandma can write a blog post or upload a photo to Facebook.
Imagine if people could easily share tutorials on specific job functions. Maybe they could take a minute to screencast pivot tables for Excel, or how to achieve a certain effect with Photoshop. Maybe they could screencast a tutorial on how to tweak out your LinkedIn profile to capitalize on SEO potential. Maybe they could screencast a step-by-step social media campaign that uses Hootsuite, bit.ly, Google Analytics, and Facebook.
You’ll notice that I really enjoy the screencast feature. When I first saw Bloomfire’s screencast tool, I was hooked. I had never seen something so user-friendly. And trust me…I’ve tried a lot of screencasting tools!
And with multinational organizations, they are very concerned with security. After all, if a NASA employee created a quick screencast involving some sensitive material, I don’t think NASA would want that leaking outside their organization. To cap it all off, organizations want this platform instantly—without having to arrange multiple meetings with the IT department—and preferably with a pricetag that they could file away on their expense reports.
The way I see it, Bloomfire enables plug-and-play, peer-to-peer learning at a jaw-dropping price—a convergence of the best of social media and the best of eLearning.
Tags: bloomfire, elearning, millenials, social learning, social networking