Streamline Training & Documentation: Like a Trip to the Museum

Friday, May 19, 2006

Like a Trip to the Museum

Even people making a real effort to control how many gadgets they carry around with them are putting an iPod on their short list¹, along with a cell phone and/or a PDA (personal digital assistant).

The growing prevalence of MP3 players such as the iPod is fostering an explosion of podcasting. In an earlier post, I talked about using podcasts in sales training as a replacement for the venerable audiotape. In addition to training, the growing success of podcasting in a whole array of other applications — education, book publishing, news, entertainment, marketing, keeping in touch with family and friends — is quite astonishing.

In today's New York Times, Randy Kennedy talks about how museums are using podcasts to guide visitors through their galleries, and even to communicate information about their collections to people who aren't actually able to get to the museum.² As a representative of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art puts it, "We made a conscious decision that this was going to be a kind of audio art zine. And we weren't going to draw any hard and fast boundaries about whether you listened to it in the museum or during your commute."

Podcasting museums offer some ideas that trainers can borrow.

Have employees make podcasts for peer teaching. For example, a group of employees might go out and record brief interviews with customers for sharing and discussion.

Use podcasts to communicate updates and other information from the organization's leaders and top experts that everyone in the organization needs to be familiar with.

Train marketing personnel on how to use podcasting as a medium for reaching particular target audiences in an engaging manner.

Use archival material, such as vintage radio ads, to illustrate themes of change and continuity at your company. (This is a natural for marketing communications companies.)

Distribute podcasts that refresh and update learning from a training course.

And, similarly to the way some museums are selectively distributing podcasts sumitted by members of the public, companies can invite employees to suggest ideas for podcasts, and then help produce those that whatever group is responsible for screening suggestions agrees will be useful to co-workers.
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¹ You can find a wealth of information on MP3 players, suitable for storing and playing podcasts at this page maintained by PC Magazine.

² Randy Kennedy lists several websites where you can sample museum podcasts. My personal favorite is the podcast released by the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia.

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Labels: eLearning, Web 2.0

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