The yearning to be an agent of change oftentimes means going out of the well-trodden path and creating something incredible. That’s precisely what Ragnar Behncke achieved by founding SocialMap, a firm that has transformed the education space by developing a new methodology to analyze social networks in collaborative learning contexts and workplaces. In the modern era, schools are increasingly adopting digital solutions to foster student engagement, collaborative learning and global reach with people from different continents, nationality and language. “We have applicability to the technology that is based on social networks and human behavior dynamics on leadership, power and interaction, collaboration, and active learning in the educational sector and workplace,” says Chandhu Nair, Co-Founder and Chairman, SocialMap. SocialMap’s proprietary Social Behavior Intelligence Platform employs cutting-edge techniques such as computer vision and reality mining to improve the curriculum and workplace in a scientific way through real-time feedback from the classroom and corporate training sessions rather than by intuition.

“At the core, what really differentiates SocialMap is that we analyze the collective data to decipher KPIs in terms of participation, leadership, and also the individual participation of the groups within an organization,” says Pedro Melgarejo, CTO, SocialMap. In essence, this model of analyzing social behaviors originated when Behncke was deeply involved in his collaboration with Primatology research of her sister, Isabel Behncke, at the Oxford University. He worked in the jungles of Brazil and Congo to understand and collect data regarding the social network behavior of the Chimpanzee Bonobo and used that data for social network analysis. Three structures were compiled to describe their behavior while traveling, playing, and grooming. On returning back to the Center for Advanced Research in Education (CIAE) of the University of Chile, he extrapolated the social behavior methodology used in Primatology into the collaborative learning context of students.

In the first pilot phase of the project, Behncke developed an instrument to analyze the structure and dynamics of social interactions between the students and the teacher or amongst the students that occur within the room during the learning process.