Riffiti is a short-form mobile video app to bring social learning for the next two billion.

Riffiti Blog

Short-form mobile video app for social learning

How We Defined A Solution To Massively Scale Learning With Our Startup Riffiti

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Such a genius idea for the next generation

And how much youth was buried uselessly within these walls, how much great strength perished here for nothing! I must say it all: these people are extraordinary people. They are perhaps the most gifted, the strongest of all our people. But their mighty strength perishes for nothing, perishes abnormally, unlawfully, irretrievably. And who is to blame?
–Dostoevsky, “The House of the Dead.”

When we began bootstrapping our startup Riffiti more than a year ago, one thing I knew for certain: the team we put together is so solid that there is no doubt we will make a compelling difference.

That continues to be a shining fact. We needed to knock that question of team composition and dynamics out of the park, because the stakes were high and the challenge facing us was significant–it still is, and we did knock it out of the park.

What Problem

We knew that to realize the vision that possessed us, we have to address this problem: how to massively scale learning in Indian market? 

But before that question, we asked ourselves what is the purpose of learning and when can we say that a person is truly on a learning path that benefits her career and the others in the society?

We all know the numbers–nearly 70% of Indian population is under-35; and a full 50% of us are under-25. But once we go past the numbers and take a closer look at millions of these youth, an astonishing world reveals itself.

So we put three distinct social phenomena, as they are occurring everyday in our Indian society, next to each other and tried to make a sense of what’s going on.

First. When we read in our newspapers of men in our society beating, raping and killing women; and see our men and women abusing children, discriminate rampantly based on caste, and commit indiscriminate violence, where do we think these perpetrators come from?

Of course they emerge out of these very same millions of youth, out of the very same 70%-under-35-and-50%-under-25 numbers. Only they’ve become desolate; shed their dreams of even a half-way decent city life; fell out of the demographic with English-speaking skills, and rapidly sunk into the underbelly of our society and lay buried within those walls.

Second, we know the research findings:

—“Nearly half of grade four students in government schools in India cannot answer the following question correctly: 70 -43=? They are meant to be able to do them in grade two. When it comes to reading and languages, Indian students aren’t any better either. By class 7th, more than a quarter of students are unable to read texts that class 2nd students are meant to be proficient in.”

—and this.

Third. Our Indian education system, including many startups in edtech space, are geared to help a student to pass an exam. Sure, acing an IIT entrance exam will shift a student’s prospects immensely, but what they teach in our schools and the experience needed for real-world employability are increasingly moving far apart. See this: “93% of India’s B-school graduates are useless”

As I show in a conceptual picture below of what I mean, unless and until a learner steps into the “social learning zone,” this learner is not going to be employable. I think plenty of you agree with me that even if one doesn’t have many years of schooling, if you have a high degree of social skills, your employability can be pretty good.

RiffitiZonePic

What Solution

So we need a market-worthy solution that puts the learner in the social learning zone, is easily accessible to everyone, is massively scalable, and enhances the employability of the learner.

How exactly how such a solution will look like?  More to the point, what is this social learning zone?

Social Learning Zone

By social learning, we mean the following:

  1. An approach to learning that only emphasizes learning from real-life experience of the others.  That means if you can Google it, don’t bother with Riffiti. Our emphasis is not on searchable knowledge, the sort you get from chicken-scratch internet research, but on the real-life experience that emanates directly from a real human being’s perspective.
  2. From multiple perspectives. After 20+ years of working in various high tech companies in Silicon Valley, I no longer want to learn from just one person. I want to see and hear how 5, 10 or 50 people understand and interpret the same concept–and I want my understanding to be a part of that larger diversity of understandings. That is the motivation which drove this aspect.
  3. Make it questions-based. This is vital because the social skills that enhance a learner’s employability come in the form of questions like these:
    • how to distinguish between one thing and the other,
    • how to ask a well-formulated question,
    • how to decide what comes first,
    • how to develop a skill of using apt analogies to explain something clearly,
    • how to speak clearly in our own words and get to the point within under a minute,
    • how to listen without feeling defensive,
    • how to appreciate the value of diversity,
    • how to know when your prior knowledge is hindering your current learning–coloring it with prejudice, and plenty more questions such as these.

Do any of us believe that our current school and university curriculum teach courses that answer questions like these? I, for one, don’t think so.

And finally, make it into a mobile video app to make it accessible to learners. We know the mobile internet connections aren’t exactly top-notch in India, but that’s the problem that’ll resolve itself over coming months and years.

Having understood the nature of the problem and solution in this way, we arrived at a model that not only turns the traditional learning on its head, but is a massively scalable business, is designed inherently for learning outcomes, and solves the problem of access to learning elegantly.  See below picture showing the comparison of traditional and online MOOC-style learning (top) with Riffiti learning (bottom).

RiffitiSolution

A few final words. I’ve come to believe that the traditional learning model, where a teacher issues hour-long monolog to hundreds of thousands of students on the internet, is broken. It is time to replace it with social learning where multiple people are providing their real-life experience-driven perspectives on the same concept.

Our world is full of people with tremendously valuable real-life experience, but they don’t teach because either they don’t have a teaching credential, or they don’t have time, or they don’t think they can teach. We can change that, by giving them an easy-to-use platform and watch learning explode. I hope you will join us in this glorious experiment.  Please contact me directly at raj@riffiti.com.

Are You Hiring or Seeking? Can You Make Your Case in Twenty Seconds?

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Can you even imagine such a thing as making your case in twenty seconds? What can you say in such a short time?

I am here to tell you that you’d be surprised how much you can say in twenty seconds. Let me clarify that: you’d be surprised at how much you can communicate in twenty seconds: that means not just say anything, but also let others look at your face, hear your own words and instantly connect with you at that irrepressible human level.

Trust me on this one, I started out the same way, as a skeptic. Now, after doing it a few times, I am game anytime of the day. Just give me a topic, let me mull on it for a while and if I know anything on that topic I am confident I will say something interesting to others.

You don’t believe me? Even if you believe it, why should you care? Because with Riffiti app, you can try it and judge for yourself.I wish I had this app when I was hiring (and prior to that, looking for a job.) I would’ve loved to explain in 20 seconds why my group is the most stimulating work place and, in turn, I’d have loved to see interested candidates riff back to me in 20 seconds as to why they make a great member for our team.

So, here’s an open invitation to all hiring managers and job seekers. We just opened our Riffiti app for private beta. Riffiti is a mobile video app where 1) you post a topic or a question and 2) everyone responds by recording their perspective in 20 seconds of video and posting it. And together all form a continuous stream of video riffs that bring a tremendous variety of perspectives. Why don’t you give it a shot?

Hiring managers: Just open the app (its free), type up your call-to-action question text, “We are looking for … (fill your requisition title),” and record your 20-second riff on why a candidate should be interested in your position.

Job seekers: Open the app (its free for you too), pick one of the above questions, and put your presentation skills to work! Make your case as to why they should call you for an in-person interview. All it takes is 20-seconds!

Please go to http://www.riffiti.com and signup and I will personally send invites out to you.

Riffiti: Radically Multiply Your Learning From Real People

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Our faces are organs of emotional communication…

–By a The New Yorker writer in a recent article.

When I was a boy, I used to sleepwalk. I also used to dream a lot, and would wake up completely preoccupied with replaying my dream in my head. But it was just impossible to catch the dream, unless I really played it over and over again even before I woke up fully. Then one night I kept a notebook, with the pencil ready at the empty page, by my pillow. As soon as the dream came to me, I signaled the me in my dream that I am taking a pause, then turned over and making sure not to open my eyes, I wrote furiously in the book and went back to sleep.

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Next morning as soon as I was awake I eagerly opened the page and read with fascination what I had written. Reading those pages, I was convinced that I had come to possess special powers by which an entire set of worlds existed in my head, unknown to anyone other than me. I was just a boy, but all the world’s goodness was in my heart, it now seems.

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In school and later in college, I would look secretly at my teacher’s face, hoping that somehow the teacher was already looking at me, pleased at who I am. But often the popular students in the class stole the teacher’s attention. Now, after all these many years, with two decades as a silicon valley professional, I am as sure as I can be of one thing: that the only way to connect with our fellow learners and students is tolook straight into their eyes and speak to them directly.

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And what magic speaking does! The simple act of taking a deep breath, opening the mouth and actually saying out loud in our own words, is the most stimulating and challenging task any learner can do.

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And what if we give learners a way to interact with one another, yes, even in this age of mobile phones and mobile screens? And what if this interaction is anchored on a given question or a topic, outside the classroom, in learner’s own social situation? Riffiti, a new mobile learning app, embodies such a belief.

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On Riffiti, everything happens by means of chunks of 20-second video; and each chunk is called a riff. You post a topic, usually in the form of a question. It’s a social app, so your friends, students, colleagues, fellow learners and educators will see the question and they will start elaborating on the question by recording their own 20-second video riffs with their mobile phone camera, and tap on a button to post the video. Together all your 20-second video riffs form a stream of understandings on that question.

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With this new Riffiti app, all of a sudden you can now see and hear how 5 or 10 or 100 people from a variety of backgrounds and experiences understood a concept or an idea; they can be anywhere in the world, from any culture; you get to hear it in their own words, and your understanding will be a part of that diversity of understandings.

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With Riffiti (a combination of the words “riff” and “graffiti”; and rhymes with “graffiti”) all of a sudden our learning is no longer only limited to in-class time. A Riffiti user can interleave multiple perspectives on a given topic, mix up the topics, and can ask any unstructured question. And most important, Riffiti makes oral explanation the centerpiece of the learning experience.

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Having published my first novel just 5 months ago, my experience of having worked on it for about 8 years convinces me to believe that Riffiti will be a place where a river of insight from literary and art world will flow to non-literary types. Writers, poets, journalists, travel lovers, playwrights, skit and comedy artists, young men and women, non-English speaking people, practically everyone with something to say, will find Riffiti a place they love to check in, and no reason to leave!

So, if you are on Riffiti, perhaps it won’t be such a bad thing that you appear to be looking into your mobile phone all the time.

Anything Worth Saying Can Be Said in 20 Seconds in Your Own Words

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What, you think I am crazy to make such a statement? In fact, let me make a further claim: if you believe you are fortunate to have attended reasonably good schools, made something good out of it for yourself and your family; and if you are not exactly warming up to the idea of mentoring a handful of youngsters only when you could muster some free time; if you wish you could do something at a larger scale without having to either donate money (you really don’t know where it goes eventually) or your time (it’s hard enough to manage your own life), then what I am about to say will interest you.

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We need to think of learning in a different way. The traditional class-room-centric, MOOC model is feed-forward, where a single teacher teaches to large populations of students. It is 2015 and not 1915. When it comes to learning, it no longer makes sense to learn and educate ourselves from just one person teaching an entire topic by herself. We should start thinking about a large number of people—consumers like us—engaging others in this different kind of learning.

How does it work?

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In this new kind of learning you only have to spend 20 seconds to make a contribution. You can choose to spend as many chunks of 20 seconds as you wish.

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You don’t have to be an expert. You just have to tap into what you already know in your current state of your life. Need I say that donating your perspective is unlike donating your money or donating your time; that donating your education enhances your possession of it?

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You don’t have to go anywhere to engage in such 20-second chunks. It’ll all right there on your mobile phone. You can be anywhere in the world. Night or day. You could be standing in line. Or relaxing at a coffee shop at an airport. Or having a quiet conversation with your family or friends.

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Fire up the Riffiti mobile app and post any topic in the form of a question. Put yourself in front of your mobile camera, get right to the point, and simply speak your piece in 20 seconds flat. People will trust you because they see your face and your emotions.

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Others on Riffiti respond by posting their 20-second riffs from their smartphone.

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Most significantly, you don’t have to speak English language. You can engage in a foreign language, as long as you find the right group of people who understand your language.

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Now back to my headline question. I said, “Anything worth saying can be said in 20 seconds in your words.” You are thinking, “What can anything useful be said in 20 seconds?”

Let me demonstrate it to you. Here are three questions, each of a different variety. I am including my 20-second video riffs to these questions.

Question #1) Elevator pitch on Riffiti

 

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Question #2) What makes a good conversation?

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Question #3) Why is it that making mistakes is not a bad thing?

 

Now imagine 5 or 10 or 100 people adding their own 20-second perspectives for each of these questions. For each such question, there will be a continuous stream of 20-second video riffs flowing on your smartphone screen. It’ll be a riffstream of a variety of human perspectives. What could be more stimulating and rewarding than that?

This is my dream and I want to make it your dream. What do you think? Care to give it a shot? I believe this is the future. Come join us at www.riffiti.com and signup! It’s FREE!

On Riffiti, You Learn Because You Say It In Your Own Words

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“We stay because we believe. We leave because we are disillusioned. We come back because we are lost. We die because we are committed.”

Jesus Raza, the Mexican revolutionary character, brilliantly played by Jack Palance in the movie The Professionals (1966)

We can all agree, by virtue of various encounters in our own lives, that educated people are not necessarily moral people. To educate a child one can begin by teaching the child first the numbers, then the arithmetic and then when the young mind is ready, the calculus, in a structurally hierarchical knowledge enhancement.

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However, to enrich a young person’s moral life, there must be an exchange of a moral experience.

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As we get older, we tend to conclude that most personal questions that arise in our hearts and minds, we can either answer them ourselves when we take the time to think of them further; or they are too simple or too stupid for us to ask others (these days asking others means asking online) about them; or we believe we ought to already know better. Children don’t seem to have this concluding voice in their heads; hence they are more free and more imaginative.

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As a young student I went to college because I believed. I left because I was disillusioned that no one around me cared about my specific circumstance and my story. I went back because I was lost. And now, as I am so much older, I am committed. More than so in my past, I believe a person’s individual story, her specific circumstance matters so very greatly. One simply must pay attention. People ask so little of you, that just by listening to them carefully, you’ll be of service to them.

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The idea behind Riffiti is a belief that the exchange of moral experiences is possible. This is actually a very common idea. We see it around us everyday that the sharing and exchange of wisdom and insights do not require the skill of reading and writing. But the tricky thing is, often the education system puts pre-requisites of reading and writing to even have access to the school, let alone learn anything in the classroom, and these pre-requisites themselves will become a barrier.

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On Riffiti, the emphasis is shifted to speaking, reciting, saying, talking and expressing yourself directly to others. If you can hear and speak, in any language you know, not just the English language, you should be ready to learn on Riffiti.

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The traditional class-room-centric, MOOC model is feed-forward, where a single teacher teaches to large populations of students.

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On Riffiti, on the other hand, you will be a part of the experience where large populations of students and teachers engage in learning with the same large populations of teachers and students.

We believe this is the future.

Come join us! Please visit www.riffiti.com and signup!

Five Ways to Utilize Riffiti Learning App

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A scene in the newly-released movie Birdman goes like this. It is night. Emma Stone and Edward Norton are on the roof of the theater building. Streets down below are buzzing with life and light.

Emma Stone: “If you weren’t afraid, what would you want to do to me?

Edward Norton: “I’d pull your eyes out of your head.”

Emma Stone: “That’s sweet.”

Edward Norton: “I’d put them in my own skull, and look around so I could see the street the way I used to when I was your age.”

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Are you a teacher? Great. You are not? No problem. Just simply a curious learner? Even better. Say what? You don’t even like the label “learner?” Not an issue. You are just curious? Then you are like me. Often I don’t think of myself as a “student,” in the usual sense of that word. I mean, I don’t go to college anymore, and frankly, I don’t really like to just listen to a teacher and take notes and come home.

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Don’t get me wrong, I love taking courses, going to university, and I like the experience of being a student. But all that only when I am actually taking a class in a school or actually attending a university. When I am not going to school, my image of myself is not a note-taking student, but someone who is very keen on finding connections among things that I already know.

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That single impulse—to find connections among stuff we already know—is one of the many underlying motivations behind Riffiti. By the way, I often use the word “elaborate” when I am describing Riffiti, and there’s a reason for that. I was reading Making it Stick–The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, and was struck by this passage: “Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know. The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later.”

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Once you began using Riffiti actively, you will find that the app is a stimulating place with several interesting things happening and it reveals itself in various ways to you.

For example, when you are on Riffiti, you will:

  1. Shift your emphasis to speaking, and saying. Force yourself to orally express your idea in your own words.
  2. See immediately that English language is NOT a necessary requirement for learning. You can have an entire Riffiti channel in your own native language.
  3. Riffiti will force you to ask the right, and precise, questions—and elaborate with equal brevity on such questions.
  4. Listen and see people who are not professional teachers talk about their perspectives.
  5. You will mix it up. In a single Riffiti session, lasting a few minutes, you can go from a mind-twisting topic such as, “What would Frodo Baggins do if he’s in the novel Charlotte’s Web?” to thinking about “What makes a good conversation?” and switching over to responding to the question, “You want to be an interior designer, but you’ve never been one. Say out loud ‘I am an interior designer.’”

We are just a few weeks away from releasing the alpha version. So, get ready to start riffing!

Riffiti: Large Populations Elaborating Microquestions on Mobile Video

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We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory.

–R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience

Hello there, welcome! Have you had a good holiday break? Ok then, you must be rearing to start off your new year by getting some serious work done, so let me cut to the chase.

In this post I want to introduce a new mobile app for learning we are developing. First of all, let me submit to you that this is no ordinary learning app. This is not an app where there’s a single teacher explaining concepts and others are listening in—we have MOOCs for that—nor is this a massive search engine organizing knowledge —we already have Google and Wikipedia for that, why do we need anything else? So what is it?

A real quick background. Over the past 20-odd years in Silicon Valley I’ve tried to do many things in my life. Apart from my day job doing product management at various semiconductor companies, I am a published novelist, a translator of poetry, author of two books on high technology product management, created a 30+ video Udemy course on product management, and I run a small publishing company (please go on over here for my full biography.)

Along the way I became increasingly convinced that the best teachers in our lives are not textbooks. The best teaching moments in our lives are when we are moved emotionally. But textbooks do not move us emotionally. We are moved emotionally mainly when other people are telling us things—and telling us how the world appears to them.

After that I became obsessed with one idea: that the most interesting teachable moments, the fascinating moments of understandings happen to us when we are listening to people when they are talking about what stuff means to them. This “stuff” could be anything, i.e., how they interpreted a concept, a flash of insight only their cultural background could’ve brought in, a recollection, a dream, a lesson learnt, a lucid understanding of something, anything.

This way of sharing experiences, insights, teachable moments, moments of understanding, and knowledge, will then become a most stimulating, always-on real-world classroom for everyone—regardless of age, race, culture, gender and class.

That is Riffiti, our mobile learning app. Needless to say, I am excited but plenty nervous—I have no idea whether people will find it useful, but there’s only one way to find out! In a few weeks we will have a version (MVP) ready for you all. Please give it a try! Signup here—http://www.riffiti.com.

And let me ask you, no, beg you, saying please, please, please, to help spread the word about it: tweet it, put it on your Facebook, send it to everyone in your network, especially teachers, parents, educators, coaches, trainers and generally anyone with a passion for learning in their heart. Thank you!