Creation of Cognitra

Cognitra LLC was initially launched by Cindy Galbraith, Pine City, MN, USA, in October 2009. A new tool and several changes later, you are looking at the latest version.

Social Media & Social Learning Website

Cognitra is really a combination of social media and social learning. Social media includes the sites and applications that we use to share content with each other. Social learning is focused on deliberate learning from each other on topics of interest or necessity. See the diagram below to learn more. The Cognitra website includes the top half of the diagram below in the areas of Blogs and MicroMedia, Multimedia, and Crowd Sourcing. Currently, Cognitra is not integrated with Social Networks or made Location Aware but this will likely change as the business concept evolves.

See the diagram below from The Geek Girls presentation at the Professional Association of Computer Trainers (PACT) 2010 to learn more. The Cognitra website includes the areas of multimedia and crowd sourcing. 

Human Lifecycle Management

The process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal is called Product Lifecycle Management. (Wikipedia)

• This same concept can be applied to the management of the entire lifecycle of a human being – from beginning to end.
• Human Lifecycle Management focuses on the proactive management of human life – from birth to death – in a more structured and guided way to help ensure that each life is successful.
• One of the key tenets of this theory is on comprehensive learning inside and outside of school to improve behavior and enhance life and job performance.
• While many nations have done a good job focusing on formal education inside an academic school environment, informal learning outside of school has tended to happen by chance via family, friends, community organizations, and religious institutions.
• What if this “learning by chance” outside of school for life and job skills was modified to be more deliberate and guided learning? Imagine if a business concept could improve learning outside of school by just 5-10%!

Business Problem

Competing within a global workforce for good jobs will only get more fierce yet:

• Parents and guardians struggle to know when and how to best introduce and reinforce informal learning topics such as conlict management, money management, project management, relationship management and more.
• Informal learning today is based mainly on what was transferred down over the generations via family members, topic discussions with friends and colleagues, reading books. and discovering web articles scattered across the Web.
• As a result, learning outside of school tends to be chaotic and haphazard at best. Yet many would argue that the management of conflict, money, projects, and relationships to name a few, are just as important to master for personal and professional success, if not more so, than formal academic subjects.
• Hence, learning outside of school today is not as productive as a result, leaving students less prepared to compete in a global economy.

Business Solution

Use Human Lifecycle Management as the business vision and provide a social media and social learning website for major informal learning life and job topics such as conflict management, money management, project management, relationship management and so on. Leverage the crowd to help source the rich learning content – or utilize Crowdsourcing.

• Providing more structure and guidance by offering outside of school topics and lessons by age range so that subjects are introduced at an appropriate time for learning.
• Provide lessons that build upon each other so the learning outcomes are enhanced at each level.
• Provide various kinds of online learning interaction based on modern multimedia tools such as text, documents, video, audio, podcasts, blogs, e-learning, simulations, games, chat, webinars, and more.
• The website can also leverage what makes sense in the physical word such as books, board games, educational toys, and more.
• Use social media tools so members can create and capture the vast amount of informal learning content that would be required.
• The user generated content can be tagged and labeled based on desired categories so it is easy to look up areas of interest. 
• Make learning engaging, interesting, and fun!