Corporate Podcasting - Increasing Reach and Collaborative Learning

I recently got a chance to try out the latest invention to boost employee morale and productivity - SLEEP POD - the new worlds answer to the problem that as a society, at least 65% of us aren't getting any sleep ( the fact that I am writing this post at 4.22am substantially proves the theory right and puts me into the category of the '65%' :). I must say that the sleep pod sure is the answer that sleepy travelers and weary workers have been looking for.

Whilst, I slowly drifted into the power nap that I was supposed to I wondered what the 65% of the sleepy and weary learners would like when it came to stimulating their interests in learning a specific skill or acquiring a knowledge in a way that was fresh, quick, insightful, and sincere. - PODCASTING as an integral part of their learning experience be it formal or informal.

The term "podcasting" was first used in 2004, and since then, it has absolutely taken off. The benefits of pod casting are plenty. Since it is already on the verge to fully mature it holds lot of benefits to its users. For instance, at it's basic best, it is possible to be abreast of all the news with this technology. The business world has also discovered podcasting and its many practical applications that can basically be applied to any product or type of business and with a bit of creativity, campaigns geared towards certain products can reach a wide audience in the podcasting world. As always the action started in the Marketing world and has now slowly drifted and been accepted across the varipus departments, with the most recent converts being Training.

In the past corporations would have frequent needs to meet with various employees semi-regularly depending on the project, training, or for what ever it was they were trying to accomplish. Communications were desperately necessary, but were limited to phone calls, phone messages, HTML messages, emails, etc. Now, however, the new means of corporate podcasting has given corporations, large and small, a new, more efficient way of getting their message across.

Training is always a big problem in corporations - namely, how to give your employees, or staff the training they need without hurting your work force while they take time off for that training. The solution - business podcasts that allows the training to be done at the employees' desire. The podcasts can be listened to while commuting, taking a walk, on the treadmill, etc. Done right, it can be very effective, but is limited to training that can be done by listening only - no hands on experience given. But in recent times the evolution of this media has moved closer to experiential learning - especially learning from the experiences of others. We’re viewing the corporate learning world shifting from focusing on the parts to focusing on the whole, focusing on the individual to focusing on interactions, focusing upon systems outside the observer to focusing on systems that include the observer.

A major milestone in this regard has been the launch of FlockPod - the worlds first social interaction pod. Guaranteed to take corporate learning to the next level. A small place on any Web page where people get together on-the-spot, while staying on the page. The central idea of FlockPod is to provide a space on any web page for various users to collaborate and interact right on-the-spot, to share ideas, opinions, experiences, anecdotes or sometimes even to question, reason or debate.

Organizations can use FlockPod in a multitude of ways: They can invite debate and feedback on electronic documents, conduct spots polls and surveys of their employees and customers, allow knowledge workers to support each other, create mini-knowledge-bases, foster informal learning, collaborate on Web research, create online user communities, and so on. Considering the ever increasing need of training departments for content moderation in user-generated content, the FlockPod software also allows Administrators and Pod Managers a variety of privileges for deleting, archiving and blocking at source unwanted content.

So, what's the big deal ?
On-the-spot interaction. Guided interaction. Relevance-based display. Those are the three big things with FlockPod. First, your social interactions are on-the-spot, where the content is, right inside the content. You do not wander around by following outbound links. Stay within the content and interact. Second, the interactions are guided by templates. You will not feel lost in a long threaded discussion, or a blog which rambles on, or a wiki that links in a thousand different ways. You will enjoy a structured interaction, such as a debate with well-defined perspectives and points to support each perspective, for instance. Third, relevant information automatically bubbles up in FlockPod. This means, the power of social ranking and relevance calculation at your fingertips.

If you are interested in social networking and integration with learning you could look at Elgg. In essence it is an open source Facebook which you can download, install and configure. The good news is that it integrates with Moodle so you can use it along with the wiki, forums, chats and tracking facilities of Moodle. However, a lot of corporates are still nervous of letting staff free to publish material and participate in social networking and this is where FlockPod scores over since it allows Administrators and Pod Managers a variety of privileges for deleting, archiving and blocking at source unwanted content. Elgg is about creating your own social networking site. So it may be viewed as personal environment or eportfolio tool. It allows users to integrate their own weblog, file repository, online profile and RSS reader. It is more about social networking than social collaboration.

FlockPod works with any HTML content (blogs, wikis, forums, eLearning courses etc.), as long as these sites allow a single line of FlockPod code to be inserted in their pages.

The beta testing of the product is now over and new introductions have been made to the product based on trials and user feedback. Visit http://www.flockpod.com/whatnew.html to know more about the new release.

The million dollar question is if companies will catch up with the potential benefits of this form of collaboration ?