Learning with Learni.st - A Great Visual Learning Experience

Social Learning

 By Karen Masullo EVP, Social Media for Firestorm

Oh those fabulous folks at Grockit. If you're not familiar with Grockit: "Grockit is the social learning company that makes products that help people learn from other people."  Grockit makes Test Prep products for the GMAT, SAT, ACT, LSAT, GRE and other university admissions tests.

Grockit was founded in 2007 by Farb (Farbood) Nivi, a former Teacher of the Year for The Princeton Review and academic director at Kaplan. "Over 1M people worldwide have used Grockit to successfully prepare for tests. And more people have used Grockit through private network partner deployments for K-12 schools, online universities and virtual schools."

Today, it would appear that Mr. Nivi and team gave us Learni.st, and I thank them. Read the official announcement from Grockit.

UPDATE: We will be Hosting an Introducing Learni.st webinar with a Learni.st Representative on Wednesday, June 6th at 2PM Eastern.  Register here and more details to come.

What is Learni.st?

 In their own words: "Welcome to the future of learning. Learnist is organizing all of the wisdom of mankind in text, images, video and audio, curated by fellow humans for your learning convenience. Enjoy."

Have you ever thought, "Gee, I've got a bunch of old lumber out back...what can I do with it?" Type "Lumber" into the search field on Learni.st and get ideas; roll over the "course Board" images to "View" a video, "Read" an article, "Do" a project and many other activity choices.  If you've used Pinterest, the interface will be familiar to you. If you haven't, don't fret, the interface is easy peasy.
 
  
I chose the Board "Building a Workbench": from here I can get step by step instructions, Video, advice, and I can keep track of what I've learned by marking the board item or individual modules within as completed. Yes I could use a search engine, but wait, there's more!

I can share it. There is also a conversation stream for questions, clarification, and collaboration.

Plus it's aesthetically pleasing, clean and fast. I'm an impatient, visual learner so this is important to me.
 
One can also create a collaborative Learni.st experience by inviting others to author or source material within a specific Board.  For instance, the initial How To Use Learnist Board is a collaborative effort by a number of authors:
 
 
 
The How To Use Learnist Board itself has video to watch, articles to read, contact information, and general help information.

I began experimenting in creating my own Learni.st Boards last night, and was thrilled with how simple it was to create the board, tag it, add content, add comments, images and other relevant information.  Given that Firestorm is creating a number of new learning sessions with our Expert Council members and partner learning organizations, the timing is perfect!

Firestorm creates a significant amount of original content - from self-assessments and tool-kits to original webinars and video learning. The ability to quickly aggregate relevant content for you, in a way that presents learning the way YOU want it based upon your learning style is very exciting to me.

We see a tremendous opportunity to share critical, real-time Crisis Management and Disaster Response learning information to your employees, community and family.

I also reached out to Learni.st and the response was immediate and very customer focused.  I like that in a company.

I can't wait to share more with you as I learn(ist) it, so connect via Facebook or ping me if you want an invite in the comments of this post, on Facebook or via Twitter.  You can follow Learni.st on Twitter here: LearnistTweets and on Facebook here.