Can gamers change the world? How about designing world saving games? Jane Mcgonigal says no one wants to change the world just because it is good or because they are supposed to. But if you immerse them in an epic adventure and  say "We have run out of oil" . Here is a challenge for you to survive. People act. Jane also narrates an interesting story where 2500 years ago people in the kingdom of Lydia fought famine for 18 years by playing the game of dice.  One day they ate, the next day they spent time playing games. They got so immersed in the game that they never remembered that they didn’t eat. When the famine didn’t get better, they played one last dice game. The winner would leave Lydia to search for a place where they could survive leaving behind other people who could survive on the little resources available. That was an interesting story! The key here is gamers have great problem solving skills or rather games can be used to increase problem solving skills in people. What are gamers getting good at? Jane identifies the following list: Urgent optimism - Gamers can  tackle obstacle. Social fabric - Gamers can easily build social relationships. Blissful productivity - Gamers can put in lot of hard work. Epic meaning - Gamers love to be attached to adventures, missions. Listen to this inspiring lecture by Jane Mcgonigal now:

View more presentations from Agile Dimensions LLC.Travel budgets are under pressure. Traditional 2d collaboration tools help, but may not engage our minds or convey as much information as 3d virtual worlds. Many companies, universities, and government bodies are using virtual worlds for collaboration. But what are the pitfalls? Bill Krebs or "Agile Bill" and Keith Voos spent some time at Agile 2010 delivering one of the coolest talks on virtual worlds. His introduction slides are horrible (I'm sorry), but I'm a big fan of Learning in 3D so Distributed Agile in Virtual Worlds really does seem like the thing to do! We're all global - everyone has someone with a colleague in a different timezone or different country. Relationships drive productivity - that's what Agile development about. Teleconferencing is a thing of the past - out of sight, out of mind and it gets terribly unfair when some people are face to face and others are remote. Webcams are ok, but a noisy medium because of all the stuff going on in the background. Global team face travel budget slashes and while we love face to face, we need to find better ways of communicating when we're not face to face. The (virtual) office of 2015 will have: spatial audio (so you know when someone's speaking from your left or right);a sense of proximity (so you can feel people sitting close to you);shared interactive objects (which you can program);and a sense of presence with your team mates which is invaluable.Again, this is NOT better than face to face -- but this is definitely the best substitute. I get upset hearing, "Oh, but nothing beats face to face.". Yeah that's true, but do we sit on our haunches when we don't have face to face? Saving Money Bill showed some interesting metrics. He ran an estimated cost for a face to face conference and the cost differences with the virtual world were quite phenomenal. As against 60k for the face to face conference, the virtual conference cost just about $8.5k. Yes, there's some starting trouble, but apparently once you get used to it, it's quite a lot of fun for people who get to know this thing. The big thing for me is how we save paper, reduce our carbon footprint. There are tradeoffs, no doubt - but here's a way to collaborate often without the headache of costs, travel, time lost to travel, labor, food, etc. Some case studies: State Farm Insurance - saved over $1 million by using virtual worldsAgile Dimensions - Saved 76% by using virtual worlds.Univ of Washington - Demonstrated this technology to the White House!Problems with Other Approches The problem with webinars, despite the fact that I love them, is that it doesn't create virtual presence. It encourages multi-tasking and isn't a medium supportive to total immersion. There's some information loss from face to face. Bill believes that we're close to 85% of face to face effectiveness with virtual worlds. Keith is a lot more bullish than that - he thinks we don't lose much. Our virtual world participant from Pacific time, Pamela, says we'll miss the smell, but there are things like highlighting, etc. which improve communication in some way. I'm still a bit sceptical of those who believe that they can 'train with slides' in these environments. That is just crazy - if you have to facilitate in a virtual world, then it needs to use co-creation capabilities to set up activities that are far more intense than face to face. You can keep as many big visible charts as you'd like on your virtual world walls. People can collaborate on documents and spreadsheets in realtime from within the world and the technology's getting better each day. How does Agile relate to Virtual Worlds? I liked examples that Bill showed on how to Estimate in 3D. He showed their University of Washington course with their visual kanban boards and work in progress within the world. He also showed us the Agile Factory where it was interesting to see 'Team Feet', a way to do planning poker in 3D environments. The technology has still to cross the chasm, but we need to persist with it to get better and be where we need to be in 2015. It's a bit like Agile - new now and a silent revolution, but will be the norm in time to come. Experiences at State Farm Insurance State Farm is using Teleplace since October 2009. They've experimented with multiple environments in recent years. They finished their project 9 months earlier than they'd planned, which sounds very very cool. Couple of pitfalls: Second Life is a social tool, so be careful in how you introduce it in the enterprise.Develop the right code of conduct in the world. Involve your legal team to know about ownership of information, and other issues.State Farm now uses Teleplace for their Agile training and coaching. They have a separate community for this initiative to provide ongoing support to the organisation. Their projects have dispersed teams, offshore communication needs and are highly collaborative through their virtual worlds. Keith mentioned that his relationships with his teams have become so strong that despite not being face to face he's such great friends with his offshore counterparts that they've invited him to their weddings. He's seen performance improvements in leaps in bounds where developers who were about to be thrown off the team have turned a corner given the huge leap in collaboration abilities. There were lots of testimonials Keith showed from his experience - all good experiences. You can see the testimonials and the pros and cons on the slide-deck above. Pitfalls There are some pitfalls to the approach, though the benefits are immense: Bandwidth.Initial learning curve with collaborating this way.Graphics cards, because some netbooks don't just have the capability for this stuff.Of course, there's the usual issues with Firewalls.You can contact Agile Dimensions for help with this stuff. Looks like they have a lot of experience with this.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Over the last two DevLearn conferences, the big buzz has been around Mobile Learning. While the thinking around this was far more mature this time around, a lot of the initial conversations still seemed to be around porting existing elearning courses onto mobile devices. Of course, the presence of pioneers such as Neil Lasher, Judy Brown, Ellen Wagner and others has helped clear the air around mobile learning a bit. I think at the recent conference, it was pretty clear that mobile learning isn't exactly 'elearning on the move'. Nor is mobile learning all about the iPhone, though the images on this post might make it seem like that. To confess, I've gotten interested about learning on the go ever since I got an iPod - and that's not even a mobile phone! In that, you might already realise that there are several different degrees of mobility. The heterogeneous nature of the mobile ecosystem today brings a bunch of challenges with it:Varying form-factors of devices - screen sizes vary across several mobile devices.Varying platforms that bring the challenge of compatibility across devices. Droids, iPhones, Blackberry phones and Symbian phones are as different from each other as chalk and cheese. Varying degrees of internet connectivity; from 4G connectivity in the USA, to absolutely limited connectivity in Africa and most of Asia.Varying platform capabilities - not everyone has an iPhone or a Droid. In fact my curent phone is so worn out that I can't even see the keypad.These challenges aside, mobile learning is a storm that's coming especially with feature phones and smartphones becoming a common phenomenon across a lot of the modern workforce. I'm by no means an expert in this space - just a commentator. I have however, been observing a bunch of patterns with mobile learning that could become the norm for how this practice evolves in the enterprise. In today's blogpost (which I anticipate could be a tad long), I want to outline some of these patterns and invite discussion on what you think the future of this space could look like.Learning AppsHaving an iPod has opened me up to the world of mobile apps and I've been looking for learning applications like a hungry cat. My device has several applications that will teach you something or another. For example I use an application called Presenter Pro that's a free download from Rexi Media. The app is a little pocketbook of wisdom on making better presentations and has examples, exercises and quizzes that'll keep you engaged. In a similar manner I've got an application on my iPod that's all about Delhi and is helping my wife plan a trip at the end of this year. An app about Yoga poses has become my anytime, anywhere yoga instructor in a pocket. Apps are starting to get so ubiquitous that it's led Clive Shepherd to ask if they're the future of elearning. I personally think apps have a long way to go on that front, because not everyone has a smartphone. Even if they did, an app based strategy is risky and costly given the development skills your team will need and the number of platforms that dot this space. Apps definitely have some place in your learning strategy of the future, but I guess it'll always tricky if you put all your eggs in this basket.Books and DocumentsMy Kindle has revolutionised the way I read, and the availability of reading applications for Kindle books on PCs, Macs and mobile phones has made my learning extremely flexible. In fact the reading experience on the Kindle is so social that it gives me the opportunity to share my thoughts about what I'm reading, with my social network - anytime, anywhere.  Then again, the notion of bookclubs becomes far more interesting with Kindles. You can have upto six separate devices connected to one Amazon account. Which means that the books, bookmarks, notes and highlights also sync across the devices. This has interesting implications for learning in the enterprise. Devices like Copia seem to be built for enterprise book communities from the ground up. Also, the ubiqutous nature of formats such as PDF makes portability almost a non-issue across devices - that makes iBooks my favourite application on the iPod. In fact, online applications like Project Rome make PDF a far more interactive format than what we've known it to be. Is this a low cost entry point to provide low-cost, high-quality mobile learning to our workforce?Podcasting and Portable MediaAt DevLearn, I had the pleasure of meeting Inge De Waard, who has really pushed the envelope of elearning by taking mobile learning to South America. Now who would think that continents with limited connectivity options could support the high-quality, video based learning that Inge's team created for medical professionals in this location? As you may be able to glean from the slides here, the idea is quite simple. The health care workers all have iPhones, because these are significantly more convenient to carry around than laptops. The videos come from a freely published podcast on the iTunes store. To get around the cost of 3G connectivity, the institute of tropical medicine have gone ahead and provided these health workers with Airport Express wireless routers that they can use with their home broadband connections. That allows them to download the videos on their iPhones and access them on the move. For a health worker on the road, the big challenge is to have the ability to keep charging their device - video takes a lot out of your phone. So these guys have solar chargers for their phones - now that is clever! Given how effective video can be for showing demonstrations, introducing scenarios and short educational lessons, this is something that could be another low-cost, yet effective way to get learning onto the mobile. Don't know how to create a podcast? Here's a tutorial.Social Media on the MoveMy favourite use of mobile phones is to ensure that people stay engaged and connected with each other to learn socially. A lot of public internet applications already have feature phone and smartphone interfaces. I'm talking about applications like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. This apart, enterprise social software like Jive and Yammer have full fledged interfaces on the major smartphone platforms. The advantage of mobile connectivity for social learning is that it really starts to make learning an anytime, anywhere process. For enterprise social software, this takes away a huge barrier to participation - people can get answers to their questions, see interesting information emerge and co-create knowledge on the go. The key for success in my opinion, is to ensure that you pick social software that already provides mobile access. That reduces your deployment time in a big way and you can focus on the people angle of social media instead.Game Based LearningI was greatly influenced by Byron Reeves' keynote at DevLearn 2010. Byron mentioned the power of games in creating engagement and driving learning and Richard Culatta followed up with a pretty outstanding lightning talk on 9 reasons why you should throw out your online courses and start using games instead. While I think Richard's perhaps a bit too radical, I really liked his arguments - particularly how games encourage mastery by immersing individuals in a performance context. I think all games teach something or the other. For example the game you see in the photo above (Trainyard) is a great way to learn about analytical thinking and problem solving. It gives you the safety to fail until you succeed and in fact you get the see the consequence of every decision you make. There isn't always just one way to solve a problem, which is pretty cool because it encourages individual thinking. I could keep going about why Trainyard's so cool, but I think you should learn from an expert instead. The gaming pattern is an interesting one to use for learning on the go, though I think heterogenous environments could make it quite expensive. Having said this, I think there are inexpensive ways of engaging people. Alternate reality games like the Zombie Apocalypse and Dr. StrangeLearn should be quite simple to port to a mobile web format that is cross platform, yet engaging.Performance SupportOne of the highlights of DevLearn 2010's Demofest was Neil Lasher's Phone2Learn. While I couldn't attend the demo myself, I know from the crowd I saw around Neil, that this was one of the stars of the show. The concept is quite interesting. Neil has gotten mobile learning back to the basics -- all mobile phones carry voice and Neil wants to leverage that basic capability. He's propagating the idea of a learning conversation and the concept of "Just-too-late" learning. Often we realise the need to learn only after we start working on something and don't know how to finish it. This is the "Oh Sh*t!" moment that drives a lot of modern day learning. What if you could pick up the phone and just ask someone how to solve your problem at this point? Neil's system facilitates this learning conversation by harnessing the latest in voice technology. In Neil's words, "The most natural way to learn. Ask for what you need and have someone explain it to you as and when you need it and at a pace you can absorb."While it remains to be seen how popular the concept of learning conversations becomes, it seems evident to me that this has a lot of value in environments that include innumerable small transactions. Performance support definitely has it's place in the workplace -- Neil's concept is a creative example of extending this approach to mobile devices. The Mobile WebIn April this year, Paul Clothier wrote a very interesting article about Mobile Learning on the iPhone. Paul mentioned how easy it can be to create a mobile formatted website using simple tools like iWebKit. At DevLearn, Judy Brown showcased a mobile learning primer from ADL, which is what you see on image above. This is nothing but a simple website formatted for mobile access using iWebKit. For teams that have limited budgets and are looking to provide short, bite-sized chunks of learning over a mobile, this could be a good way to optimise for the form factor of the devices. What's more, this pattern could be cross platform and is unlikely to require a huge chunk of change to port across devices. Nice, huh? Those are the patterns for mobile learning that I see from my experience. What other patterns have you been seeing? Do you have some revolutionary ideas to facilitate learning on the go? Let me know by commenting on this blogpost. That'll go a long way in making this article complete!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

"We're dropping use of the word 'training.' Replacing it with learning? Training materials? Training materials? We don't need any stinking training materials Training is a turn off! Learning is what I go for. Training is what you do to me. Learning is what I do for myself I hope "training" is discontinued on an ongoing bases - requirements change. More sunset laws for training programs. What we did yesterday/last year differs from now and tomorrow."Those are some of the comments I heard on a recent lrnchat. It seems to me that training is fast becoming a taboo word. In several other conversations, I've often people quite agitated very mention of the word. I agree that a lot of training that we've seen is not just ineffective, but an absolute waste of time. That said, bad training doesn't mean that training is bad; just like a few bad cars don't make all cars bad. Now, if you follow this blog you'll know that I'm of the view that training isn't a solution for all learning problems. On the other hand, I still believe that training does have a place in the corporate world. In fact training will continue to hold it's place for a long time to come. I write this post in defense of training and to make my case for the fact that it is not a bad word. We're beating up on an old definition of trainingA lot of the criticism for training seems to stem from a very outdated understanding of what training really is. We seem to beat up on the 'sage on stage' mode of training. Frankly, most serious training practitioners adopt more of a 'guide by the side' approach. To tell the truth, some of the best training I've seen in the recent past, involves a lot more meaningful interactivity than elearning page turners. And when I talk about interactivity, I'm talking about modeling real world tasks. Now, I don't believe you can use classroom training to make sea changes in behaviour. At the same time, I can tell you that effective classroom training can raise as much awareness as some of the high quality elearning you'll see across the world. I request practitioners of technology enabled learning to research modern training methods before criticising a mode of teaching that most of us don't practise anymore.Training can be an extremely Social processAt ThoughtWorks University, we've stretched training to being a very social process. In fact, we use technology quite liberally, we sprinkle in elearning for the purposes that it makes sense. We rely on communities of practice and social learning to stretch beyond the best practice education that elearning provides. Through a blend of technology and SME led facilitation, we've simulated a workscape that lets individuals learn while at work and creating real value for the organisation. I call ThoughtWorks University a training program -- it embodies what a modern induction experience should look like. The fact is that we've evolved training to be what it can be in today's world. If there are some programs that aren't evolving, we need to help them change. The slow pace of change however, doesn't make the world of 'training' ineffective.Don't Underestimate the value of Presentation SkillsThere's no saying how valuable great presentation skills are. I write about this almost untiringly, because this is a skill that excellent trainers bring with them. When driving change, elearning and technology enabled media helps a lot, but nothing works like person-to-person contact. Short, 30-45 minute training sessions, powered by excellent presentation skills can be an excellent, low cost, yet interactive approach to build awareness. A traveling roadshow of select, highly skilled presenters can be significantly cheaper and more effective than a multi-million dollar multimedia extravaganza which may not have a huge shelf life. Think about it, your trainers are not ready to be extinct yet!The role of trainers is changing. As Jane Bozarth once famously said, "Trainers won't be replaced by technology, they'll be replaced by trainers who are willing to use technology." That's all that's likely to happen. On that note, I request that we hold back our criticism for training and realise that it has a small, yet important place in corporate learning strategy. That's my only defense for what looks like a dying competence - I hope you see my point. Do let me know what you think, by commenting on this blogpost. One way or another, I'd like to hear your views.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

This morning, after my successful iPad purchase (yeah!), I'm attending Judy Brown's session on mobile learning best practices. Judy's an absolute goddess in this neck of the woods, so I'm hoping to learn heaps from her, so without further ado, I'm going to start liveblogging and letting you know what I think I'm learning. Technology is changing rapidly and it's a whole new world today, says Judy. The US seems to be a little behind Japan in terms of technology, but they're definitely up there in learning innovation. Judy is speaking about her stint with Asian Development Plan with UNESCO. The folks there were asked to come up with their mobile learning plans with some of them not having electricity! In contrast, in the west people carry Blackberrys and iPhones. In Asia and Africa at least this is starting to be about just supporting life as usual.Mobile penetration is quite heavy, given the show of hands of the group here. 26.5% people engaged in mLearning, 40% exploring. 51% report a positive ROI! Ambient Insight reports that mobile learning is here and is a ripe technology (across seven categories of learning). eLearning is actually coming down a fair bit. Venture capitalists are investing heavily in this market as well, because mobile technologies have really unlimited reach while desktop technologies have lmited reach. We're moving to the second generation of mobile learning with cloud based, 4G connectivity. Eric Schmidt describes the mobile ecosystem as a confluence of computing power, connectivity and cloud computing and proclaims a new focus for the industry - putting mobile first. EBay and Southwest have gone ahead and changed direction significantly given their mobile strategy. We only use 23% of what's on a web page - the rest is noise. Mobile cuts that flab out in a big way. We're creating heaps of information today - is our curriculum adding to the information flab? Judy's now going through several slides very quickly.The key is that social, local and mobile are all converging. HTML5 is a key innovation at this time that can potentially help portability of interactive apps across platforms. We have interesting stats in place about mobile penetration (source Tomi Ahonen):5.2 billion subscribers>625m access internet only through mobile4.2 billion people use text messagingPeople look at their devices every 6.5 minutes on an averageThere are more people with mobile phones than with toothbrushesRay Kurzweil says "Mobile phones are misnamed. They should be called gateways to human knowledge." The UK has done a lot of projects in mLearning focussing on new age devices though. Learners say that it made learning more interesting and made them learn in a wider range of places. They say they can learn in a wider range of times. Teachers say that they're able to tailor their learning experiences to their learning in a big way. Judy recommends the w3c mobile site as a great place to learn.Tips to get startedBegin with the user: What are they already doing with mobile? Several students own cell phones. Smartphones have grewat penetration. People are using these for media creation - video and stills.Start with the end in mind: What do you want to accomplish? Are you trying to help increase sales? Will this be performance support? Will this connect communities? Will this help with reference materials? If you're doing something just for fun, it's not meaningful. The 5 moments of learning needs are when people want to learn for the first time, when wanting to learn more, when trying to remember, when things change, when something goes wrong. Which moment are you catering to? What nuggets will people take away from other learning experiences that people need immediate access to? This could be the driver for mobile. This is not just elearning on the mobile. Judy recommends mobile for stolen moments of productivity. The US Army believes that perishable knowledge should not be taught in the schoolhouse, but instead be made accessible. Judy also recommends that we think outside the course.Plan for Success: What will success look like for you? Many companies can't share what they're doing, but Judy has a great case study from Merrill Lynch's mobile program - GoLearn. They've discovered that going mobile makes things 45% faster. 100% of their audience want more of this kind of stuff and 99% of the audience believe that the format supports learning in a big way. The problem was that they didn't plan for this success and were not able to deal with the deluge of demand that followed. Remember Capabilities: What is not available to people on the desktop or laptop? It's important to design for the form factor and capabilties of the new devices than just porting an old way of designing to the mobile platform. GPS, multi-touch, voice, cameras, video recording - these are all new capabilties and they need to feed into the design decisions. Think about content creation, basic communications, training delivery, social networking, on-demand information access.Think Differently: Judy showed us a commercial course on language. The cool aspect of this course is a nifty little twitter button which the user can press and that brings up a twitter stream that shows the word or phrase you're learning about in the context of people's live tweets! What a cool way of understanding how to construct sentences in a new language? A tweet that Judy is showing us tells a story of how easy it is to deploy to mobile app stores (3 days on Android, 5 days on apple's app store) as against 112 days to go to print! Judy is also showing the app for the Obama campaign that we also participated in. How awesome! There's a hair dressing curriculum on mobile - I personally find that interesting; do I want someone to read a course on mobile and then cut my hair?Think small: Bitesized, nuggets, micro-learning, small screens. Remember mLearning is about different platforms!Consider spacing effect: It's now affordable. We know that repetition is key to retention. We know that learning that happens over a period of time is naturally aligned to the way we pick up our skills. She is showing how based upon a woman's delivery date, she can send text messages to number and get information over time that makes sense at the time that expecting mothers need this. Information in context, trumps instruction out of context. In Neil Lasher's case it can just be a simple phone call. Will Thalheimer has heaps of research in support of the spacing effect.Consider tools: What do you need? An app? Or are you going to deploy just for the browser? Or are you going to invest in cross platform development? There are products that act more like platform connecting to your LMS and act as players for your mobile device. This is an example of develop once, deploy many times. There's a nice mlearning guide at ADL that should work across all devices - this is an example of making a mobile website that just works across several devices. ePub is a great format to publish to mobile devices. Judy is showing a crisis response related project that she built in 3 hours, that works across several devices.Test, test, test: Judy puts a lot of stress on testing, though with the caveat that emulators are the same thing as actual devices.Plan for distribution and ongoing support: Make it known, market it, make it visible. Does your IT helpdesk know how to support this?Looking ahead: Judy recommends that we look ahead at emerging technologies like augmented reality, QR codes, augmented reality and interactive story telling (ARIS). And contrary to popular belief this may not be a huge cost to create.Don't try to boil the ocean: Judy also says that we shouldn't bite off more than we can chew. We need to start with doable projects. I would add that we need to start small, think big, release quickly and iterate!Important considerationsJudy recommends that we think of the following seriously:SecurityIT partnershipPoliciesOwnershipAssessmentUnion and time issuesConnectivityBandwidth costsIndustry changesUser expectationsResources that Judy recommendsmLearncon - coming up in June this yearhttp://adlmobile.wikispaces.comhttp://mlearnopedia.comhttp://cc.mlearnopedia.comhttp://www.ambientinsight.com/Reports/MobileLearning.aspxIn addition, Judy does a weekly newsletter every Monday morning that you may want to subscribe to. This in my opinion is a great catalogue of the state of the art in this space.© Sumeet Moghe

(This is a rehash of a co-authored blogpost with my colleague Gayathri Sekar)Our story begins in ThoughtWorks Pune, somewhere in October. We’d recently decided to hire a journalist to mine stories from the ground. She’d try to translate ThoughtWorkers’ voices into words and if necessary write their stories for them. Fortunately or unfortunately, we got to a point where we asked ourselves whether this would be an authentic way of communicating in the office. As it turned out, we agreed it wouldn’t be. Our problems still remained - we had a fantastic oral, storytelling culture, but when it came to writing about our work or experiences, we didn’t think much of what we do.It was then that we had an epiphany. How about we used the same money that we’d use to hire a journalist, to instead engage ThoughtWorkers in writing about their work lives? Not only would the communication be far more authentic, we also stood a good chance of shaping a culture where people could write freely without the fear of being judged or considering their experiences to be "not much to write home about".Belief: Every ThoughtWorker has something to write home about. You never know how useful your experiences could be to your colleagues or to other people.With that belief in mind, we set out planning a blogging campaign. I'd had done a course on Gamification with Prof Kevin Werbach of UPenn. We decided that we’ll run a contest in the office - inspired by a similar comtest that our marketing team had organised. We wanted to adhere to a few key principles though. WWe wanted to keep the entry barrier low, the feedback loops tight and the sense of achievement high. After all, those are the characteristics of any good game. In our contest, it didn’t matter where you posted your article, as long as ThoughtWorkers could see it. Every contribution got you points and every audience reaction to your contribution got you points as well. Of course, the more the effort behind your post, and the greater the value to ThoughtWorks or ThoughtWorkers, the more points you got. So, posts with videos and posts that went on to ThoughtWorks Insights would get a bagful of points. Just like that, we set things up and waited for the deluge to begin.Learning: Keep things simple. Lower entry barriers, build in feedback and give everyone a sense of achievement.Our idea, while popular with our general manager Chirag Doshi and a few others in the office, did find some skepticism. We almost ran into some rough weather with the name "Pune Blogging Competition". After all, our inspiration was a set of well managed, centrally run contests and ours was the cheap, local imitation. The fear was that we may undermine the notion of a blogging competition. We got some suggestions telling us to change the name to anything but "Blogging Competition". The skeptics also felt that we won’t be able to generate much good content. At the end of the day, how much can such a volunteer army do? We have to confess, we were a bit stung by those views. We did believe in the potential of our idea though, so we set aside the criticism and stuck to our plans.Learning: Don’t underestimate the value of a ground up, organic initiative. ThoughtWorkers in particular will surprise and amaze you.Our contest began sluggishly to be honest. There were rumours of people gaming our gamification and the entries, though regular, weren’t quite the deluge we were expecting. This is when Chirag reaffirmed what we were thinking - our contest needed to be one where everyone wins. With help from a few colleagues, we designed our first goodie - a limited edition, ThoughtWorks blogging t-shirt. We floated the rumour of a goodie for every participant. The idea was an immediate hit - the deluge hit us! Even as we got ourselves to cope with the massive number of entries, folks from the marketing team reached out to use our design for her own team. Game on, we said!Learning: Winning isn’t everything, so the rewards shouldn’t be for winners alone.As we read through the entries for the contest, we realised that points and rewards apart, our game needed a layer of communication and feedback. We instituted a leaderboard that we’d update daily and a weekly roundup that’d summarise the posts from the week. The idea was to keep the sense of progress in the game and build that tight feedback loop we wanted, while also ensuring that no entry falls by the wayside because of a lack of attention. It’s interesting how far a little discussion on our internal social network reaches. We’d receive responses to our weekly roundup from people who were not even in Pune. The leaderboard on the other hand, kept getting people excited about their own performance in the contest. The number of points they got was not just an indication of how popular their post was with their audience, but also how well they’d promoted it. It was a contest yes, but with a great sense of camaraderie to go with it.Learning: People like feedback and a sense of progress. Finding a way to showcase contributions goes a long way.When you institutionalise a platform, there'll be its haters, regardless of how good at is. And sometimes that meme of how bad a platform is, goes around. Our internal social network isn't unusual and receives its own share of criticism. As an organisation some of us have almost built a false narrative that we can’t drive engaging initiatives using the platform. That criticism has seen a number of parallel platforms emerge (since we're a company of techies after all), which incidentally have a very poor footfall for a company our size. Some platforms die a natural death while others live on as long as certain individuals have the drive to manage them. For our purpose, the corporate social network provided a great, low-entry-barrier platform for first time bloggers. The email integrations ensured that the bloggers had an opportunity to publicise their posts to a wide audience as well. Our leaderboards and roundups too, got the biggest possible audience. The platform didn’t suck as bad as people said it did.Learning: Platforms don’t matter as much as we think they do. Focus on communicating well and the platform will do its job in the background.Just to spice up the contest a bit we went ahead and added our own easter eggs to the contest. Apart from promising a hoodie as a goodie for the month of December, we announced that the 31st blogger of the month stands to win the limited edition t-shirt from the previous month. We can’t remember the last time there were so many blogposts on New Year’s eve. Some posts came through just a few minutes before the clock ticked over - when even we, the organisers were in a holiday mood! Similarly this month we have three surprise gifts in addition to the sling bag we’ve promised. In 23 days, January’s given us 34 entries to the blogging contest, making it our most productive month thus far. All in all, to this day, the Pune Blogging Competition has generated 106 entries which is more than a blog a day!The cool side effect has been the participation of first time bloggers, who were keen to pen down their learnings and were not feel shy about sharing them with their peers and co-workers. In fact, the reach went beyond ThoughtWorks itseld. People posted on their personal blog and showed the confidence to share their experiences with the outside world. We now also have a physical blogging wall in the Pune office, where people’s posts go up with their photographs and a scannable QR code.Learning: People like surprises and sometimes just the regular set of incentives may not be enough. A small push goes a long way.What we'd like to leave people with, is a blogging culture that is innate and not driven purely by incentives. The big visible wall in the office will provide the information radiator for this change. Our aim was to kickstart a culture where firstly ThoughtWorkers won't be fearful of writing, and once they’d write they won't be fearful to share. We still have some way to go on that journey, but we hope that by the end of 2015 we can build a blogging culture that Pune’s proud of. In the interim we’re hoping to graduate from individual achievements to team based and then office based achievements. That of course will be with a new group of curators in charge. In addition, we’ve set up a Pune Writers' Peer Group  - a bunch of bloggers in Pune who’re happy to review the writing of new authors just in case they need feedback or a set of friendly eyes to look over their content.Learning: It’s not enough to start an experiment. We want to try making change that lasts.As curators of the Pune Blogging contest, we’ve enjoyed the experience thoroughly. We’ve read a lot, written a lot, developed strong friendships and been part of an initiative we can look back at with great fondness. It’s been a great ride and with just about a week to go, we hope we’ll end on a high as well. Thanks to everyone who played along!© Sumeet Moghe

This month's Big Question question is Workplace Learning in 10 years?A very pertinent question to ask in such times, as we hear of more and more failure rates in formal and push learning. Most of our generation have learned this way, and some like me have always found such learning boring from the very beginning. My parents, would force me to learn the way the other 'good' kids learned, and I would resist and prefer to stay in my own dreamworld, that I found more fascinating than my study books. Fortunately for me, every year before the final exam my mom would hound me into preparing for the exams and I would come out scoring reasonably well. Now I can owe my 'decent' job to all the 'push' I got from my parents. But given a chance, I would not like to go back to studying the way I did in school, though I owe my 'formal' degrees to the 'formal' learning I received. But I did have some pretty good teachers. My Geography teacher had a unique style compared to the other teachers in my school. She would ask us to close our text books, and teach us sitting on the desk like she was telling us a story. She would bring us pictures of the Aurora Borialis, and various phenomena, pictures of the different kind of jungles, videos of the equatorial forests, etc. and make her lessons much more interesting. I still remember a lot of Geography owing to her style. I even remember the Agents of Denudation project in my 10th grade, on which I worked very hard to get information from various sources. The whole process was simply made more interesting for me as I had to find and discover the information myself, and this process helped me retain the information in the long term.This is pretty much the reality for me. When I started work, I joined an elearning company. This is where I was exposed to elearning, and also where I learned about instructional design, but this was purely on the job and with no formal training. Again, the process of discovery got me more interested in the subject. Overtime, I learned more and more about instructional design from the Internet, on my job, connecting with my peers and learning from their experiences, forums, etc. So even though I have a degree in Science and have studied programming in college, I learned instructional designing out of sheer interest and am here writing my views on the big question of the month. Since we do not have formal degrees and PhD courses in the field of instructional designing in India yet, I'm sure all of my peers in India would have learned pretty much the same way. All this is enough proof of how 'informal' and 'pull' learning work well and you have a 'motivated' learner out there who learns better because of his interest. Such a trend is already prevalent in these times, and is obviously driving towards a form of learning that is slowly but certainly, moving away from traditional learning consisting of learning blocks of course, module, lesson structures.The Road Ahead...My predictions for the road ahead would be in the lines of what we all are talking about in the form of Ask and thou shall receive, seek and thou shall find. That's precisely what futuristic learning is going to be like irrespective of the time frame. In my view, the discriminating features of workplace learning for the times to come would be:Learner-centric—All forms of learning will keep in mind the needs of the learner as the greatest priority.Relevant—The focus will be to provide to the point and no-nonsense information. Long texty content will be passe. Unlearn-relearn—It will be vital to unlearn several things of what worked in the past, and relearn them to understand their significance as of today. Thus, learners will have to be open-minded.Reference hybrids—Lots of task-oriented reference material will be created and available to learners in the form of demos, quick-reference materials, advanced tool tips, task-focused documentation, wikis, blogs, etc. These materials will be the reusable entities available for creating presentation/training material on the fly.Knowledge bases—Due to the extensive amount of learning materials that will be created the knowledge bases will grow in size. This will call for efficient knowledge management systems to organize and index the information, and also provide very efficient search capabilities. For example, I can imagine search spanning across wikis, forums, blogs all at once and giving the learner, the seeker of the information, exactly what he wants, irrespective of the source.Idea management tools—The top management of organizations will reach out to employees via Idea Management tools, throw open questions about business problems that they need solutions to, and give employees at all levels an opportunity to share ideas that will help do business better, create new standards, coin best practices, design innovative solutions for using the products better and coming up with better ideas for creating innovative products. As a result employees will feel motivated and appreciated for their contribution and eventually be valuable to the organization.Social/Professional networking—Learning will be greatly augmented depending on an individuals ability to reach out and network with people of the same community, trigger interesting discussions, and come to a consensus at the end. Collaborative learning—The willingness to share what you have learned with the community, and being open to getting their suggestions, feedback and ideas will be critical. Wikis, forums, blogs will be the different medium, and they will be well integrated to drive collaborative learning. This will promote learning across hierarchies and learning will not be limited only to certain roles.Brainstorming—Brainstorming on topics with peers and colleagues will supplement learning and aid the mental process of learning. Eventually, learners will achieve higher levels of cognition in their field of expertise and be able to graduate to levels of professional consultants .Gadget independent—Learning will move towards achieving gadget/medium independence and formats will come about that will be compatible in all kinds of systems. Windows versus Mac users will not have the same compatibility issues.Simple, usable and intuitive interfaces—All the new gadgets and networking tools will be designed for greater usability, simplicity and be intuitive to use. For example, we never had to learn how to use Google or Orkut. Just because the interfaces are intuitive people just 'learned' to use them and love them.Scenario-based—Learning will be more focused on real life scenarios replicating the tasks that the learner will perform in their jobs. Simulations, decision-tree learning modules, learning games, etc. will be some examples of such learning.Multi-faceted—It will become imperative to learn about the job you do from different perspectives. If you're a coder you will not only need learn the internal functionality of the product but also get a perspective of the customers point of view and the problems a customer faces while using the product. The requirement for knowledge will be more holistic and the learner will be in a position to add value to their job.Learning outcomes—Organizations will get 'real' by encouraging their training initiatives based on the observed learning outcomes. They will measure the performance of learners and evaluate the training initiatives. There will certainly be a reality check to ensure that their money is getting invested in the right directions. Having said all the above, one needs to realize that this will be a global trend but at all times there will be variations based on specifics:You may not be able to share top secret, confidential, proprietary information this way.We have to see how 'open' the times become with 'open' source, cloud computing etc.Your organization may have their own quirks about doing things the way the world is doing them.You may still have the typical digital immigrant species driving your organization, and it maybe difficult to bring about change all of a sudden as after all your audience does matter.Knowing how these factors will influence learning trends maybe another discussion altogether.

Tony Karrer is organizing a session on elearning on May 21st between 9 AM to noon pacific time. He is looking for people to present examples of practical solutions to common problems to leading edge solutions. Some example areas that he quotes:Self-Paced CoursesPerformance Support ToolsMobile LearningCollaborative LearningSocial / Network Learning3D LearningGamesToolkitsInteresting ToolsIf you are interested, please send me an email (akarrer@techempower.com) with:A brief descriptionA couple of example screen shotsHe is expecting to have more examples than we can show and discuss in the 3 hours and will try to choose a variety of different examples that represent effective patterns.

We are extremely excited to be bringing you Tanner Gers, a US Paralympic Gold Medalist, to come onto the show and discuss the great sport of Beep Baseball. After losing control of his car in an auto accident, Tanner lost his sight at age 21. The biggest tragedy in Tanner’s life, wasn’t losing his sight. It was not living life, and taking every day by the horns, like he does today. Tanner is currently trying to get Beep Baseball into the Paralympics. In the podcast, he discusses the steps he is taking to bring the competitive sport of Beep Baseball to the international spot light. He goes in-depth about what the sport did for him and the reminder it gave him that he still has plenty of value in this world.You can find the podcast here as well! Here is a video that shows the sport of Beep Baseball...If you want to learn more about how you can help spread the word of Beep Baseball please visit nbba.org.

Hello podcast listeners! I am happy to be launching our 5th podcast to all of you! We had Matt Mescall the APE teacher for Maryland school for the blind come in and have a talk with us about the importance of individualized programming and staying active outside of a school setting. Matthew is a 2011 graduate of New York State College at Brockport where he was awarded the APAC’s (Adapted Physical Activity Council) National Most Outstanding Undergraduate of the Year.  Matthew has worked as a specialist for various sport and fitness programs for children who are blind or visually impaired throughout the country including Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland and Alaska and one is Moscow Russia.  He is also a board member for his local AER (Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired) DC/MD Chapter and is one of the co-founders of a division on "Physical Activity and Recreation" within the international organization. Matthew presented at various state and international AER  conferences on sport opportunities and modifications for children with visual impairments.  Matthew was the POSB (Principals of Schools for the Blind) 2015 Outstanding Teacher of Students who are Blind or Visually Impaired.You can find the podcast here as well! Let me know any thoughts you have about upcoming podcast topics or if there is an event/product that you would like to be mentioned in the podcast!Until next time!!Scott McNamara, APE Man!