Powering social learning: Bloomfire formalizes informal learning — from mlive.com by Olivia Pulsinelli, Business Review West Michigan
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According to its Web site, “Bloomfire is everything traditional learning is not.”
Bloomfire founder Josh Little compared his new company, a hub of online learning communities, to gardens. Companies or other groups can sign up for Bloomfire, a monthly service which officially launches March 15, and each group’s “garden” of informal, social-learning opportunities can be dedicated to anything from sales strategies to fishing.
“Whatever a group or whatever a community would like to teach each other, you could deploy a Bloomfire,” said Little, who is based in Kalamazoo.
From his work at Pfizer and Stryker — and most recently, from working with other corporations through his online training-course development company, Maestro eLearning — Little and his team came up with the idea to create a tool companies could use as a way for employees to quickly and easily share knowledge and help each other build on that knowledge.
Bloomfire focuses on informal learning, which Little said contributes to about 90 percent of the knowledge that most people need to do their jobs. Informal learning usually comes from conversations and on-the-job or trial-and-error experiences.
“Bloomfire is a way to take all that informal learning and formalize it — somehow capture and harness that,” Little said.
On Bloomfire, one can do three things — teach, learn and manage.