Here's a simple Social Learning technique you should try on your Training Course

Today was a great day at ThoughtWorks University. Our graduates have reached the business end of the course and are building a real-world application as part of their work here. To help people build their presentation skills and also for them to share knowledge and insights, we've organised Pecha-Kucha nights in the office. The idea is pretty simple:

• Every week, six students and a few trainers present.
• People can present on any topic of their choice as long as it's valuable to the group.
• Their talks should have no more than 20 slides which automatically transition within 20 seconds each.
• Everyone in the group has to present at least once.
• We do this once a week, on Wednesdays and we bring pizzas into the office (or an alternate snack).

So that's the general format, and we did our first Pecha-Kucha night today. And was it awesome or what! For one, I consider myself to be a good enough presenter - but was I humbled by my students! I can speak to the quality of the presentations out there and some of them were so good that I feel honoured to be in the company of such people. More than the content of the presentations, I really felt that the talks gave us a different level of acquaintance with each other which will shape our ties over the weeks, months and years to come.

We had topics ranging from how to play Euchre to the coolness of mathematics; from why dogs are man's best friend to someone's first experience with programming (a complex social system). We had advice on sports, careers and blogging and there were some great questions as well.  To blow my own trumpet, I'll say our first Pecha-Kucha night was a great success, given how much we achieved in less than 90 minutes (pizza eating and socialising included).

If you'd like to see the presentations, you can find them under the twupk tag on slideshare. For your benefit, I've also added the presentations to this blogpost, so you can see some of them from here. Of course, nothing can beat the experience of watching people speak live; so you've got to pardon us if the slides don't make sense by themselves.

Before I leave you to view all the nice presentation-ware, I'd like to encourage you to try an activity such as this on your training program and see what people do. As trainers if we can relinquish some control and give that back to our students; more importantly treat them as peers, they're likely to amaze and astound us. That's what our students did to us today. So try it out - give up some control and be prepared to be amazed.

Molly Bartlett

Chris Reade

My First Program - by Chris Reade

Rose Fan

blogging and you - a love story


Andrew Clarke

Mathematics and You - Andrew Clarke


Ragavan Govindraj

Why we do what we do

Sanjiv Suman

Sports - Sanjiv Suman


Sumeet Moghe

Career Advice Pecha Kucha for TWU Grads