Saturday, March 07, 2009

Kern's Second Workshop on Web 2.0 in Mumbai - Post Lunch

The session is underway post lunch! Vaishnavi is doing a great job of facilitating this group of enthusiastic and vocal participants. Every participant has great insights and opinions to share - which has made the session very interactive. Now, the participants had a go at the Virtual World. They created their 'avatars' and explored places - from IKEA to Coca Cola to Amity Business School! Interesting discussion followed about the potential of using virtual world in real world training.

They weighed out the pros and cons of using virtual world versus simulations. Participants explored their use in a typical sales training scenario, in an induction program scenario and other possible applications. Post a preview of the web 2.0 tools and their potentials, they are now on to hands-on tasks about tackling their workplace training using these tools.

As part of the team activities, the teams came up with very interesting ideas about the uses of Web 2.0 tools in their training scenario. Post enthusiastic discussions about Kern's philosophy of 360 degree training, the workshop came to an end. We hope to carry forward discussions, exchange ideas, and share information with our participants on our Workshop forum. Thanks to Rahul for all logistical support! It was a great venue, great participants, and a great workshop!

Kern's Second Workshop on Web 2.0 in Mumbai

Kern's second web 2.0 has started off to a great start in Mumbai. It's a great convention center - Avanta at Bandra Kurla Complex. We have one whole wall that overlooks the Mumbai landscape, Our participants have come in well ahead of time, which is a great thing. This time we have an interesting mix of participants from diverse background - Nitin from Mahindra First Choice, Ruchita, Swati, and Shikha from Kotak Life Insurance, Vineeta from Godrej Agrotech, Vijay from Castrol, Sachin from Convergys and Jayanti from ICMR. The participants have listed down their expectations on post-its on the wall:

- What are the various web tools?

- What are the web 2.0 tools that I can use for training?

- How do we evaluate the effectiveness of these tools?

- How to use these tools to use interactive training material?

- How to teach?

- How to use web 2.0 tools in science, technology and medical field?

- How to help us making training simpler?

- Learn about innovative learning and training modules.

- Learn simple easy to deploy tools for effective communication with internal customers.

- How can web 2.0 tools enhance my day to day working?

We had an interesting discussion about the web 2.0 tools and philosophy. Interestingly people had different perspectives on the use of these tools at work. While most of them used these tools, they perceived them as 'personal tools' and not 'official tools'. This set forth an interesting discussion on the virtues of some of these tools and their benefit at work. There was an interesting discussion about virtual worlds! Unfortunately, the virtual world seemed to be a bit of a problem because of the bandwidth problem.

Post chai and cookies, the participants have assembled for a charged-up discussion session. There seems to be an interesting discussion about our learners - their learning styles, their approach to learning, and their motivations. The current discussion is about whether "a most analytical" person is likely to play "analytical games"or not? There is one school of thought that believes that most analytical people will not spend time playing 'analytical games' and another school of thought that agrees.

Look out for more updates as the workshop progresses.