Over the last few weeks I’ve been experimenting with daily online conversations. Sort of like daily office hours, but it’s morphed into something more. Morning L&D Talk is the current working title. The new online app blab.im is the tool I use. The last few weeks have been an interesting test case in how this type of collaborative technology can be useful as a learning tool. There are the obvious collaboration methods that this tool can facilitate, but there are also some unintended collaborations that can take a conversation in a completely new direction. But overall it’s proven valuable, and so I’ll continue.

The Growth of Video Has Only Just Begun

Back in the early 2000’s I watched the early wave of blogging begin to swell. I didn’t actually jump in until mid 2005 with my blog elearndev.blogspot.com. It’s been over 10 years now and there is another publishing trend beginning to swell: Vlogging. Daily vlogging channels via YouTube have already made a few producers internet rockstars in much the same way that early bloggers became publishing sensations. But vlogging is only part of the video story.

The growth of YouTube, and popularity of “YouTubers”, has made low cost, low quality video an acceptable medium. And with improvements in bandwidth over the years live streaming is possible at a surprising high level of quality. And at the same time the growth of mobile devices has given us LIVE mobile streaming capabilities. It’s all happening so fast that keeping up can be a challenge. But if you’re still watching broadcast television on a big screen TV then you most likely have not noticed this trend. It’s a big shift. And it’s not only disrupting the TV markets, but any market associated with the production of video content. And that includes Training, Learning & Development.

It’s Time to Jump in

The Morning L&D Talk Show is my way of jumping in and testing how this might work out. I started by committing to doing something with video every day. That morphed into doing something with live collaborative video every day at a specific time. And that time became 8am Mountain Time. I don’t claim to start right at 8am. I’ve committed to streaming live within the 8 o’clock hour. I may go live at 8am, but some days I don’t get on until 8:30 or later for a variety of reason. But the nice thing about getting in on a tech wave early is that there are no rules. I get to make them up as I go. It’s how blogging started, and it’s how vlogging started. And now it’s how live collaborative mobile streaming is getting started.

If you are in corporate training, or L&D, join me in blab.im 8am MST to discuss the current trends and topics of the day. Some days I have a lot to talk about, while other days it’s a disaster of technical issues or hackers “blabjacking” my show. But hey, nobody ever said the wild west was going to be easy.

If you’d like to hear more about my adventures in tech, join me, and my Litmos colleagues, at our upcoming C3 event in Las Vegas!