The Value of Social Media for Learning

The Learning Circuits Board asks the question: How do you communicate the value of social media as a learning tool in an organization? Some random musings on an idle Friday afternoon, more to stir the pot than to answer the question.

I don’t think we have reached the stage where we can communicate the value. We haven’t even seen the value yet, haven’t even generated the value yet. Heck, we don’t even know if it really has value.

Come to think of it, are we, the learning design fraternity, really the people to talk about it? Are we experts in the medium or in the message? Are we instructional experts selling instructional forms or technical experts selling technology applications? Is it a bit like CNN and NDTV selling television sets, set-top boxes and band-width, as opposed to focusing on programming content?

Quite often, web 2.0 (the super-set for SoMe) is referred to as “small pieces, loosely joined.” So should SoMe be sold surreptitiously, in small packets? Organically ingrained in the learning solution and gradually increasing its presence? Much like how color advertising found its way into the daily newspaper in India, first in the supplements, then on the front and back pages, and then throughout?

By its very nature, SoMe is characterized by waste and excess. (I just discovered about 75 sites that offer polling and survey applications after barely a 30-min search.) So the purists won’t be unfair in viewing it with a fair degree of skepticism. Evidence is the only thing that will convince them to even get started. Start a couple of small engagements, with people who believe; slowly, as the engagement assumes some shape, include the odd skeptic; and gradually expose the project to the larger majority of naysayers.

Don’t over-love SoMe. May be some or most of it is useless after all. Give it time, give it a fair run, but prepare to bury it if it does not gain currency. If it’s a good thing, it will survive. Look at the human race.

The Ted (India) Talkers

Responding to a call from Kiruba Shankar, a bunch of us got together and embarked on a project of interviewing all the TED India fellows. Working by ourselves, we researched the fellows, prepared our questions for them, hunted out their coordinates, chased them with calls, hounded them with reminders, poked them on Facebook, and then used some more tricks from our armories. The way we went after them, they might well be referring to us as the TED Stalkers.

No, we did not manage to get all TED India fellows to respond, heck, we didn’t even get close. But the ones who responded really gave us something to savor. Here’s the list of interviews, in alphabetical order of last names. Take a few hours off to read what drives these people, and why they will be in Mysore November 4-7, 2009.

Prayas Abhinav describes himself rather humbly as ‘artist and writer’ but a closer examination reveals the potential his Cityspinning project could have on the nation.

Tahir Amin’s endeavor appears straight out of a John Grisham or a Robin Cook novel as he takes on the pharmaceutical industry through his organization I-MAK, to ensure medical breakthroughs benefit the patient as much as they do the drug firms.

Zubaida Bai runs a social venture called AYZH that helps women identify the tools they need to improve their standard of living, and then helps them acquire those tools and technologies.

Kavita Baliga was diagnosed with cancer when she was 22, and spent six months undergoing chemotherapy and radiation therapy. And while at it, she learned to play the guitar, started composing music and learned sound engineering. Five years on, she is a faculty member at A R Rahman’s KM Conservatory in Chennai.

Sanjukta Basu is a lawyer and activist and part of the non-profit organization, Breakthrough. She has reached where she has because she has believed and been led by the old dictum about change being the only constant.

Svati Bhogle won the Green Oscar (the Ashden award) in 2008 and today runs TIDE, an organization that attempts to connect manufacturers of technology products with the actual end-users of that technology, especially in small towns and in rural areas.

Sean Blagsvedt is the founder-CEO of babajobs.com, a classic organization that links the haves and the have-nots – that informal sector worker needs a job and the comfortably-placed executive wants that service.

Satyabrata Dam has climbed the highest peaks in every continent in the world, including Mount Everest. And when he was taking a break from those, he managed to find time to reach the North Pole and the South Pole.

Deepti Doshi’s career for the large part has been in volunteering and non-profits. Now she represents Escuela Nueva, an organization that could well have the most significant impact in the primary education scene in India.

Pulkit Gaur is the founder-CEO of Gridbots, a company that builds robots for industrial and military purposes, an interest he has pursued from his college days. Meet the human being behind the bots in this interview.

Neha Gupta has spawned something that could well define how Social Media benefits society, with a Facebook application, eachoneteachone, to facilitate volunteer tutoring and learning.

Sarath Guttikunda is the founder of UrbanEmissions.Info, a one-stop resource on air pollution, particularly in developing countries. Once he compiles all this info, expect Sarath to become a full-time movie critic.

Lisa Heydlauff is likely to be every child’s favorite. She is the founder-director of going to school, a non-profit trust that attracts children to school with the promise, ‘school can be fun.’

Srinivas Kiran Jaggu, an innovation fellow with Stanford India Bio-design, is currently working on IntraOz, an innovative technology product for patients who need vascular access.

Anab Jain is the founder of Superflux, a interaction design company. She has also initiated the Power of 8 project, a project where eight people from different walks of life come together to create a vision for a more desirable future.

Siddharth Kara is a corporate executive turned author. Except that his is not the kind of writing that focuses on campus lives and corporate affairs. Instead, it provides an economic and business analysis of the sex trafficking industry.

Nandu Madhava is the founder-CEO of mDhil, a company that provides basic medical information services via mobiles in India, a service that is proving to be as invaluable as it is cost-effective.

Gaurav Mishra, CEO of 2020 Social and co-founder of Vote Report India, represents the confidence of the corporate executive in Social Media as he moved from the relatively stable confines of the Tata Group to becoming the CEO of an upcoming SoMe strategy firm.

Dr. Ashwin Naik runs Vaatsalya, an organization that aims to bring low-cost, high-quality healthcare to semi-urban and rural India. Sounds logical, except that no one seems to have tried it so far in a structured manner and at a national level.

Enda Nasution being referred to as the father of the Indonesian blogging industry is a reflection as much on the 34-year old as it is on the industry.

Andy Okoroafor is currently working on a movie, Relentless. For the rest of his time, he runs Clam Studio and Clam magazine, both centered on the entertainment industry.

Kamal Quadir is the CEO of Bangladesh-based mobile e-commerce company CellBazaar.com, a company that could well be called a micro-mobile-service company.

Amit Varma needs little introduction – India Uncut, the Bastiat Prize for Journalism, My Friend Sancho…

Gaurav Vaz moved away from the security (such as it is) of the IT industry to pursue his passion of music. Today, he is a Vice President at Muckwork, bass guitarist and co-founder of Radio VeRVe.

Nikhil Velpanur is the CEO of letshead.to, a web service that lets you book your restaurant table, pay in advance, and then just go and enjoy the meal. His Twitter profile describes him as “a doctor of journalism, sailor of art and sommelier of music, masquerading as a captain of commerce.”

Pooja Warier, along with two other partners, set up UnLtd in India – an organization that supports social entrepreneurs. She strongly believes that investing in people is the key to bringing about long-term change.

Aparna Wilder is an “accidental filmmaker” and co-founder of Global Rickshaw, where she and her life partner Shivraj Shantakumar (who won MTV India’s Best Music Video Award in 2009) make short movies to promote the messages of non-profit organizations.

TED India Interview: Deepti Doshi

It was Gaurav Mishra first, then Prayas Abhinav. Now it’s the turn of TED India fellow Deepti Doshi of Escuela Nueva to answer a few questions as part of the TED India Fellows project. One statement she made in a media interview earlier this month sums up Deepti: I get inspired by the optimism of the poor. Share her optimism - read on.

Tell us a bit about the Escuela Nueva model. What makes it unique?

Think “Montessori” for the poor. Escuela Nueva is a child-centered methodology for primary school that has been developed in Colombia over the last 40 years. It is the longest lasting bottom-up education intervention in the world that at one time was in every one of 20,000 rural government schools in Colombia and now has affected over 5 million children all over the world. While the curriculum (what you teach) is adapted to meet the national norms, it is how we teach that makes the model unique. We use workbooks instead of textbooks so the child is active; children sit in groups (on tables or even on the floor) so they can work together; up to three grades can be in a classroom so that children can move at their own pace and learn from each other. Teachers are trained with the same activity based methodologies that we use to teach children and are equipped to be facilitators to support each child’s learning. Lessons are adjusted to the local environments, parents are highly engaged, often attending student government elections and each family is represented in the school in a community map. When Escuela Nueva was in every rural government school in Colombia, it was the first time, rural scores surpassed urban scores and the children in the urban schools with Escuela Nueva also scored higher than the regular urban schools. And beyond academic performance, what is really exciting to see is increased democratic behaviors in these children – taking turns, community participation, etc.!

You mention that the curriculum is adapted to meet national norms. On the other hand, one of the four components of your model is an innovative curriculum. So is Escuela Nueva a parallel movement or does it work with the existing school system?

Our goal is to increase the quality of education that poor children around the world receive. Usually, these children have access to education but unfortunately, the quality of these schools is low and learning is not happening. Imagine in India, less than 30% of children graduating fifth grade can do simple calculation and read basic stories. Our goal is to work with those schools – whether they be government schools or affordable private schools – to ensure learning is happening.

What’s your charter for Escuela Nueva in India?

To date, for the majority, Escuela Nueva has been able to achieve its scale through partnerships with the government; however, increasingly, we are looking to partner with private foundations who are working with government or low cost schools. India is one the first countries where we have entered deliberately because of the amazing gap in quality education and have not waited for the government to commission our work. It is also the first country where we are excited about working with the low cost private schools that are serving a large portion of poor school going children. We will likely start a pilot with these schools and at the same time are working with the government to bring in the model at scale.

What are the key challenges for the model in India? What were some of the modifications you needed to make for the Indian market?

Education is highly regulated in India and that makes working with the government schools tough; only recently has the government begun to outsource the management of its schools and so we are excited to be entering at the beginning of that movement. We also have a bureaucratic climate that can often slow things down but we are exerting tons of patience to take the all the right steps. At the same time, the entrepreneurial climate of India has provided incredible opportunity. Entrepreneurs from poor communities have created private schools that now serve under 30% of our children and in some urban slums, they can be supporting up to 60% of enrollment. These schools are easier to work with because the school owners are able to make their own decisions and are looking forward to bring high quality education to the kids for both financial and social reasons. And serving these schools is also allowing us to create a sustainable model where we can build revenue streams and become less dependent on aid ourselves. We can work more quickly in these schools and are looking forward to our in these schools providing a demonstration effect to the government as well.

You worked with Acumen Fund before. What catalyzed this move?

Working at Acumen has been formative to my work today. In creating the Fellows Program at Acumen I became sensitive to the human capital challenges facing the social sector. Our program was one piece to close the gap and it is exciting to see many other programs now deliberately building leadership for the social sector. At the same time, I recognized that if we wanted to solve the leadership issues in the long term, we needed to start at the core and find alternative ways to educate children – that’s what led me on a journey ultimately ending with Escuela Nueva.

And what has been your career path before that?

I went to business school as an undergrad to capture the energy of the markets in the early 2000s and figure out how to make a lot of money. My junior year, I volunteered at an orphanage that was set up in reaction to the earthquakes that devastated Bhuj, Gujarat in 2001 and recognized how much these non-profit needed managerial skill sets to run functionally and grow and that’s when my focus began shifting. I started a small nonprofit that sent undergrad business school students to non-profits in South Asia and deferred my management consulting offer to spend a year in Gujarat building a vocational training center for the same orphanage. I came back to Katzenbach Partners, where we generally focused on organizational change, teams and leadership in our work and helped the firm spin off a leadership development arm. I also helped start our non-profit practice which is how I met Acumen and you know the rest!

Let’s go back in time a bit – to your childhood days. What were some of the influences that shaped your thinking?

As a daughter of immigrants in the US, the entire family placed a lot of value on education and made sacrifices for it. My siblings and I were lucky to attend Montessori schools – and I attended until 4th grade. I believe that education has provided me the foundation for my growth and believe that’s why I am excited about out work at Escuela Nueva – I saw it as an opportunity to bring similar environment to others. We also grew up visiting India each year and often, during those trips, our parents had arranged for us to do some social work, ranging from teaching English to volunteering at eye camps; I think that exposed all of us to issues of poverty and thinking about what we can do.

How does a typical day unfold for you?

If there was such a thing as a typical day, I probably wouldn’t be doing what I do!

Who would you deem your inspirations?

Ah so many! People that come to mind are Maria Montessori and John Dewey; Gandhi and Mandela; my mom; current mentors and guides, Jacqueline Novogratz and Vicky Colbert.

If you were to start your life all over again and not follow the same path that you are following now, what would you have chosen to do? Why?

Hmm… not much would be different. I am grateful for the opportunities I have had and am pretty content! Maybe a little more sleep!

What’s one good idea you’ve heard recently that is worth spreading?

Student governments starting at 1st grade in schools serving the poor! There is no better way of seeding ideas of democracy and participation in community building. Check out how Escuela Nueva does it.

Does long-term thinking need a scientific temper?

It’s a blog musing of an academic, it is but supported with anecdotal evidence, but it certainly is an intriguing thought. Computer Science Professor David A. Patterson from the University of California, Berkeley wonders whether organizations will get better long-term focus if they get scientists and engineers on board. No prizes for guessing the blogger’s educational background, and while this does tend to dilute the power of the argument quite significantly, the premise does sounds like a good topic for some serious research and analysis. Any scientist or engineer will demand that, won’t they?

TED India Interview: Prayas Abhinav

As part of the TED India Fellows project, I interviewed TED India fellow Gaurav Mishra last time round. Now it’s the turn of Prayas Abhinav. The home page of his web site describes him simply as Artist and writer living in Bangalore, India. Dig deeper and you realize the man’s interests, from the revolutionary Cityspinning (a series of interventions that look at enhancing the use of public spaces), to writing fiction and poetry, to championing the Creative Commons movement in the country, and a bit more. Clichéd as it may sound, the term multi-faceted personality sits quite comfortably on Prayas. In this interview, Prayas opens up – on open spaces, open source content, and much more.

From psychology, which delves inside the mind, to exploring open spaces… what prompted the move?

I guess there hasn't been any move. It has meant looking at other areas and trying to draw an understanding and connections. My media of work was more writing and video before I stepped out working with neighborhoods, open urban spaces and the kind of conversations and social interactions which happen there. Maybe it engages more with the psychology of the city, the outdoors and how they shape our imagination.

Why open spaces?

I have viewed cities I have lived and grown up in as spaces of alienation, disconnection and boundaries. The culture and infrastructure of the worlds we live and transact in has led to this, there is no person or entity responsible for this in a way. One way I see of affecting this is to demonstrate and enact situations which have some other character and value. And CitySpinning tries to do that through its projects.

“re-vitalizing and re-imagining urban spaces.” How would you measure what you achieve as a “re-sult”?

There is no way of measuring the result (I like your word play). In a way what gets done with the kinds of proposals and demonstrations that CitySpinning does is a seeding of imagination and memory of the city. So, people who have encountered and experienced some of my projects may share some memories of urban spaces around them that allow them to imagine some new possibilities for them. So, a direct result could be trying to observe spillovers, reactions and stories that emerge and stay in the neighborhoods long after CitySpinning's project there have moved on.

You helped launch the Creative Commons India licenses in 2007. What is your belief around open content?

I feel open content is able to really balance the interests of the creative professionals and the project of replenishing and keeping alive the knowledge commons we all draw from. It does this by distinguishing commercial and non-commercial rights on content and defines channels for sharing the two in different ways. For the times we live in, the open content world has led to a lot of innovation in terms of forming business models which are non-coercive in nature and which work for individuals and gatekeepers in a similar way.

As an extension, do you think the print media as we know it is dead? How do you see it evolving or transforming?

The value of print as being a world to lose ourselves in, free of distractions and regardless of where we are is unique. This core value is still only partially served by other media. There are going to be technologies which offer an experience which is closer to actually reading a book but I think eventually all of these will have to co-exist with print in some ways. Print will of course have to evolve in terms of resolving its upstream and maybe making it more sustainable. Print might also need to adapt to use smarter tools for reading easier, annotation, etc.

Your writings seem to betray the psychologist in you. Is that your outlet?

My writing is an outlet as well as a process for me to understand my experiences with more clarity. Often my future courses for action are decided in some ways while writing.

Artist, writer, photographer, filmmaker… what is a unifying description of Prayas Abhinav?

A writer and artist, kind of works for me. It is ambiguous and doesn't reflect all that I do or engage with but seems to convey a general area of functioning.

Hmm… considering the many things you are involved in, I reckon time is not a commodity you have an abundance of. But do you have an interest or hobby that you escape to when you want to get away from what you are doing for a bit?

No. The only way I get away is spending time with friends and maybe going out for a drink. My friends are often not in the least interested in my work and that helps, as we talk of other things. Or maybe sometimes just enjoy easy silences.

If you were to start life afresh and choose a different area to focus on, what would that be? Why?

If I were to start afresh I would maybe have stuck to traveling and writing. It was just a more relaxed, introspective, reflective frame of mind to be in and worked with me beautifully. But, then again, maybe is the active word in the previous sentence.

If there is one thing you could change in the world, what would that be? Why?

I would make the creative arts (contemporary, folk, traditional) more central to our way of self-expression, communication and self-identification.

What’s one good idea you’ve heard recently that is worth spreading?

Have startups in India try to bring dynamism to the fields of creative practice, by balancing open content, profit and the coming together of the creative community for conversation and collaboration.

If I were to bump into you by “accident” in Bangalore (or anywhere else, for that matter), where should I be prowling? :-)

On maybe the traffic on the Bellary road, Palace road or the Old Madras road as a scooter around to do what I do in Bangalore. :-)

TED India Interview: Gaurav Mishra

As part of Kiruba Shankar’s TED India Fellows project, I am part of a team of 15 bloggers who interview five TED India fellows each to get to know them better.

First up is Gaurav Mishra. From selling cars, which, according to George Monbiot, has ‘contributed to an increase in individualism and fewer social interactions between members of different socioeconomic classes’, to becoming CEO of 2020 Social, a company that focuses on social business strategies, Gaurav has probably been the full circle. Teaching Social Media at Georgetown as a Yahoo! fellow and co-founding Vote Report India complete his wheel of activities. Here’s Gaurav in the driver’s seat.

From selling cars to devising social business strategies… what explains the move?

Both as a marketer and a consumer, I saw that the campaign-oriented push-driven one-way model of marketing was in trouble, and felt that there must be a more human way to connect with consumers. A marketing approach that is permission-based, pull-driven, and rooted in the values of communities, conversations and collaboration appealed to my instincts and started the journey that has led to 2020 Social.

What were some of the key experiences from your Tata experience that are still relevant for you at 2020 Social?

My experience in the Tata Group gave me a very strong grounding in how business and marketing works, at senior levels, quite early in my career. I also worked with both McKinsey and BCG on big business transformation initiatives, from the client side. That client-side experience is immensely useful now that I am running a business consulting firm and helping CXOs leverage emerging technologies to transform their businesses.

Tell us a little bit about Vote Report India. How did the idea originate?

The idea of Vote Report India originated during the Mumbai terrorist attack when the good folks at Ushahidi noticed how half a dozen of us were curating the #mumbai twitter feed during the Mumbai terror attack. That conversation resulted in our doing a pilot of Ushahidi Swift during the Indian elections. We were able to put together a great team of volunteers and a great service in a very short time and played an interesting role in the ecosystem of civic initiatives that emerged during the 2009 Lok Sabha elections in India.

Define gauravonomics in one paragraph.

At Gauravonomics, I write about the intersection of social technologies, business and society. It’s a potent combination because businesses, civil society organizations and governments can learn a lot from each other when it comes to understanding and using social technologies.

You have contributed to two books. When are you writing your own? What will it be about?

I think I’ll be writing a bunch of book chapters before I write a full book. I have three chapters overdue on digital activism, citizen journalism and government 2.0 and have just signed up to write another one on branded communities. My book, when I write one, will be about a new way of doing business, which is both social and sustainable.

If you were to write fiction, which genre will you choose?

I think I have already lived three or four lives and I haven’t even turned thirty. If I were to write a novel, it will be a thinly veiled autobiographical narrative in first person.

Do you have an interest or hobby that you escape to when you want to get away from what you are doing for a bit?

My life is very WYSIWYG. I am doing what I am doing because I don’t feel the need to get away from it.

Who would you deem your inspiration(s)? Why?

I am inspired by naïve activist-types who believe that they can change the world. Most of them fail, but some succeed. That’s all we need.

If you were to start life afresh and choose a different area to focus on, what would that be?

I am very happy with my present life. If I was to start afresh, I would want to do exactly what I am doing now.

One good idea you’ve heard recently that is worth spreading?

It’s time to move beyond business as usual and create organizations that are both social and sustainable.

Twenty little-known facts about Gaurav Mishra?

I’ll tell you three:

• I gave away everything I owned last year, to six strangers.
• I have an unpublished anthology of love poems lying around in my laptop.
• I like making lists of three.

Nonsense Learning

Earlier this year, Inkscrawl and I discovered how doodling helped learning and then, in the time-honored andragogical tradition of application, we put that theory into practice and thus came up with this piece titled Learning by Doodling.

Hardly had the dust settled down on that than I discover, through another good friend, that nonsense sharpens the intellect. Yes, you read that right. I suppose sense does a lot of things, but nonsense, it appears, is not total nonsense. So there we go, another brilliant opportunity for e-learning practitioners, another new age instructional approach that can differentiate you from the others who still grapple with scenarios, stories, simulations, games and other time-tested but time-worn approaches. So how do you use this breakthrough technique in your solutions?

The simplest way to use this is to just mix up your screens. Randomly change the order of the screens and you’ll get a nice simple piece of nonsense e-learning running. Imagine a learner going through an enterprise learning program and starting with transaction 7, and weaving his way systematically through steps 12, 3, 5, 9, and so on? Just unraveling it in his mind should ensure he learns better than through the mind-numbing sequence of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…

A simple extension of the mixing up technique is to program the pop-up boxes randomly. So when you are reading about the fire drill process in your office (as part of that whodunit of an Induction program), the pop-up boxes will explain the salary and benefits policy of the organization. As for the location of the fire exits, oh well, that should be somewhere there, may be nestled inside the module on the redundancy policy.

The beauty of this technique is that it does not just lend itself to instructional innovation; you can do wonders to processes and thus enhance your internal efficiencies as well. For starters, you can eliminate the review process and thus save valuable time for the reviewers and subject matter experts. Any mistakes in the content will not be called mistakes; they will be called nonsense crumbs. Figuring those out and maneuvering one’s way through the content will be a key benefit learners derive from the program. As an extension to this, you can also save money by hiring greenhorn content developers who have no idea what they are writing. The learners will figure out the nonsense anyway.

And oh yes, how can we forget a 2.0 application of this approach? You create blank slate lorem ipsum programs, and let learners populate it with whatever they want to write. Assembling such disparate pieces together will provide an absolutely award-winning piece of nonsense for the next group of learners.

Create a good nonsense portfolio, and your proposition writes itself, as the article suggests: Nonsense learning: because disorientation begets creative thinking.