Nietzsche was an atheist, and one of many out to disprove the existence of God. It's interesting that he sets this parable in a market, so we have ordinary people listening to someone who appears to be insane. The madman carries a lit lantern when there is no need for light. He starts out looking for God, crying, "I seek  God!" and those in the market tease him, asking if God is lost, or has lost his way, has emigrated, or gone on a voyage. 

It's interesting that he is carrying a light. In the Bible, light is an oft used image for the illumination of God.

• Jesus says He is the light of the world: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12) 
• At the end of the Bible in Revelation, He is also the light: And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. (Revelation 21:23)
• In the Psalms, the Bible is compared to a light: Your word is a lamp to my feet  and a light to my path. (Psalm 105:11)

​He then says we have killed God, and asks questions similar to the ones that God chastises Job with:

The madman goes on to ask, "How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?" 

To answer the madman, yes, it was people who crucified Jesus. His blood is on us. It was our sins - the wrong things that we have done - that Jesus came to die for. He allowed himself to be crucified. But he did not stay dead. The resurrection was evidenced by many, and He provided atonement for our sin through His death. We find God when we believe that. When God feels non-existent, it's not God who has moved. His evidence exists in creation, and in the changed lives of people who believe in him. I am one of them, and like the crowd in the story, many of my friends deny his existence and think like the madman, I am the fool. 

We think of ourselves as gods when we try to live without Him. "I don't need God, I can do it on my own," they say. For me, not having God would create a huge void. God has been with me in the good times and the bad. He has provided my needs, and taken me into unexpected situations, but I've never been alone, because he is ever-present with me. Does that make me mad, or reliant? I choose to rely on the One who created the world.

Many people have killed God in their own minds. Nietzsche tried to kill him and disprove His existence. Many in the scientific community deny He exists. But that doesn't mean God is dead. Was Nietzsche calling those who believe crazy? I suppose.  The bible is full of stories of those who believe among those who don't. That is the world we live in today. God gives each of us opportunity to choose to believe for ourselves, rather than forcing His will on people. ​

Me? Despite Dan Brown's philosophy, I choose to believe unwaveringly. I still think he's a great storyteller, and I enjoy the challenge and adventure that reading his books bring me. 

My neighbor Paul is a pretty smart guy so we managed to get it out of the car after a lot of pulling, pushing and shoving. He had a dolly to make it easy to get upstairs, which was a great idea until we got to the door. It didn't fit.

Being the smart guy that he is, Paul suggested we bring it upstairs in pieces, so we began dissecting the box and its contents. Who knew that this puppy would have a GAJILLION pieces! Kudos to the engineers in charge of packaging though. Between the masonite stablilizers, and lots of styrofoam, they'd sandwiched something that covered most of my walkway into a 36"x40"x6"box.

Now the fun begins. Putting it together. Easier said than done! It came with 5 pages of illustrated directions. All of the pieces were numbered with little stickers, and the numbers matched the diagram in the directions. Easy peasy, right?

WRONG.

One of the biggest challenges for me, beyond the fact that I was never the default-putter-together person in my house, is that I am a big-picture thinker, and I'm also an N, for iNtutive in Myers-Briggs speak.  Here's what that is in a nutshell from the Myers-Briggs Foundation:

What does that mean? Well, if you examined my thinking as I was trying to piece this together, there was a lot of, "Oh! This must go here. And this goes there. This is the side, this is the other side." The directions, however, expected the user to be highly detail focused, with a bunch of experience with this kind of thing. It neglected to put in notes about things like being sure to put the drawer stoppers in the back. Sure, if you look at the picture, those little stoppers are drawn in, but I was paying attention to the rails that the drawers slide on.  After putting on, taking off, turning around, then putting on 90% of the pieces, we come to the monster. The gold slider hinge thingy with the saw teeth, two arms and flippy ends. I fiddled for 45 minutes trying to figure out how this thing was supposed to go. There was no obvious answer since the pre-drilled holes matched both sides of the flippy things (Someone told me they are called flanges after the fact. Helpful. Now I know.). My first installation attempt wouldn't let the desk close flat, so that was clearly the wrong way. I tried and I tested other options and finally gave up. It was time for reinforcements. I went live on Facebook to ask for help. 

Five hours later, the desk was together. I was most grateful for the AC in the room and company of the pooch, who was content to nap nearby. I'm really pleased with how it came out, but more so what I learned about in doing this.

I'm sitting in a Panera in Las Vegas away from the chaos of the strip wearing my ELearning BrothersT-shirt gathering my thoughts about DevLearn. For the uninitiated, DevLearn is a gathering of 3000 ELearning people sponsored by the ELearning Guild. As always, it was a conference full of great learning. It's awesome seeing my friends, many I only know thru Twitter, and being able to put a face with a name. What's even better is being with kindred spirits for a few days. Since moving to Illumina Interactive, I'm blessed to be with like-minded people with a unified mission every day, and was delighted to be able to attend with five of my colleagues. Our leader has great vision and it was genius to bring the core team together to learn. I'm looking forward to the debrief on Monday.

Here's what I learned this week.

MICROLEARNING & DESIGN HACKS
I attended a workshop on design hacks and was amazed by the seamless transitions between the Adobe apps and products and the ability to carry things between them. I look forward to playing with those tricks. I also attended Ray Jimenez's session on Microlearning and realized how simply we can use story snippets for bite size learning. Workers are no longer interested in long, dedicated training sessions, I wonder though, how easily a snippet might get lost in email. I suppose if they are as startling as his example - a sleezy dude calling into a call center with inappropriate comments that froze at "What would you do?"then some choices would capture attention to make people wonder what was coming next and make then anticipate and open those emails to link to the training.

OVERALL A GREAT DAY
Overall, I had a great day, and was jazzed for the next three days of DevLearn, continued in tomorrow's blog. Till then.... :)

I've just returned from four fantastic days in sunny Southern California with my head full of learning and resolutions to return to regular blogging and to NEVER EVER fly home from the West Coast on the red eye again. I'm so not a morning person. WHAT WAS I THINKING?? But I digress.

I'm a conference junkie and I just love being around kindred spirits who get learning and are impassioned about making it work well. The Learning and Development Conference was the maiden voyage for this event, so it was an intimate gathering of many of the movers and shakers in the industry.

There were great synergies here. It was so much fun to hang with some of the tweeps I regularly attend conferences with but never get to spend time with. Some, like @triciaransom,  I saw in real life for the first time. Left to right, we have @bizlearningdude, @enzofsilva, @michellelentz, @stipton, @CandiceCPLP, @DeliaDe68218453 and @trishuhl. There were so many more!

Brent Schlenker and Luis Malbas assembled a terrific mix of the kaleidoscope of the trends in our industry during the conference's two and a half days. I was exposed to three keynote speakers that jazzed and excited me. Here's the recap of my notes.

While his model is about ever learning and always connecting to build a network on a personal level and the implications that has within organizations, Seek > Sense > Share functions well to describe what a needs assessment should be. It's an investigation (seek), looking for trends, making sense of them, then sharing your findings so that a solution can be developed to solve the problem at hand. Design thinking spends tons of time examining things first, ensuring that gaps are identified, and a solution created to fill them. Doing so ensures the right problem is solved.

Alas, not in this organization. It appears that the solution has been crafted before the problem has truly been uncovered. When you exist in a world where everything is guarded close to the chest it's really easy for mediocrity to perpetuated. You miss the perspective of the outsiders who almost always have valuable insights for you. When your focus is wrapped up on adherence to process, it's easy to forget what the process is for. When colleagues become snitches and tattle to ensure compliance with said processes, your problem is bigger than you think. When you stop looking around, it's easy to function on the hamster's wheel, always running and never getting anywhere.

​I shudder, shake the dust from my feet, and return to normalcy. It's a much better place.

I'd made a point of getting to the airport two hours early so I could spend some time relaxing and typing up my notes from the conference. TSA Pre-Check would expedite my getting to the gate and give me a bit of extra time to savor the Caribou Coffee I'd planned to procure. It was a Thursday morning, so the airport was relatively quiet. Things were going along as anticipated when I got to the security area to read a prominent sign that said, "No TSA Precheck at this Checkpoint". No biggie, I thought. The line is short, so this should go quickly.

Not so much. Little did I know what I was in for.

 After a few moments, Sally Supervisor comes over and examines what Arnie Agent hands to him. She looks me over, and asks me if I had anything else to prove my identity. I explained about the missing wallet and offered to pull up something on my phone, which she all but slapped out of my hand and informed me was not acceptable. Mind you, I have an iPhone that uses a fingerprint for identification, and had a picture of my lost license on it, along with several other items that could have been used for identification. No, no. This was not acceptable. 

She asks me if I have my old license with me. Seriously? No, I did not. Passport? No, I was not traveling internationally. Costco card? Are you kidding me? How about a piece of mail with your name on it? I don't know about you, but I generally don't travel with yesterday's mail in my backpack. I emptied my backpack, hoping to find something beyond gum wrappers and conference handouts, but alas, came up empty handed, since the receipts stuffed in there for travel only had the last four numbers of the credit card I'd handed her, which didn't count. As the clocked ticked, I wondered where this was headed. 

Sarge takes the walkie-talkie in hand and announces to someone in some office, I suppose, that they have a female ICVV in hand. Wondering what they heck that is, she marches Arnold over to the corner and informs them that they need to call security about this. She fishes a clipboard from under the corner desk, rifles through a folder, attaches the paper to it, and hands it to me to fill out. It asks for my name, address, phone number and signature. While I'm filling this out, someone who appears to be Arnold's manager informs him that he needs to go take his ATS training, and Sally nearly bites his head off and informs him that no he cannot, he must finish this first. 

I hand her the clipboard, and she compares it to my temporary license. She confirms to Arnold that it matches. (Like I would put a different address if I were a terrorist, smuggler or whatever they decided I was??) Sally looks Arnold in the eye, shows him the phone number to dial, and tells tells him in no uncertain terms that he is to tell the person on the phone that the subject has no identification. "But she has a temporary license with her picture and signature on it...." "I don't care!! You tell them that she has nothing! DO YOU UNDERSTAND??" "Yes ma'am."

Arnold dials the phone, and proceeds to read my information from the clipboard. The person on the phone must have asked about ID and he mentioned my paper license and I thought Sally was going to club him. "NO! She does not have a license. She has a receipt for a license, NOT a license." I guess the person on the other end heard that, so he asked Arnold questions to ask me. Data of birth. Job. Address (didn't I just write that down for you?). Close relative. Where do I live? (Everything I've given you says Rhode Island. Don't you believe that? And how do you think I got here in the first place since this is dated a week ago? Walk?) Apparently the person on the phone believed I was who I said I was and gave Arnold the number to let me go to the next part of this adventure. Before I go there, don't you find it odd that they people we bank with can pull up a database and ask me questions about places I lived and jobs I worked at 15 years ago to verify my identity, but the TSA has nothing of the sort. This does not inspire confidence, folks.

Sarge announced once again into her walkie-talkie, now attached to the paging system, and that she had a female ICVV, and needed an assist. Sally had me take off my shoes, pull out my laptop, empty my pockets, and she and Arnold marched me over to the screening machine, carrying my stuff, and flanking me on either side. (Did she think I was going to make a run for it?) I assumed the spread-eagle-arms-overhead-position and the machine scanned me. As usual, it detected my padded bra straps, requiring the typical pat down by the agent on the other side to ensure I wasn't smuggling anything in them. Gel, maybe? As she did this, she was joined by six (Six?? Do I really look that scary?) female agents and another male agent who picked up my stuff and carried it all over to another area to be searched. Sarge dismisses Arnold, and tells him to expect a call in an hour asking if the police got involved. 

Each of the new agents took a swab and wiped down my shoes, laptop, and emptied every item out of my backpack, gum wrappers and all. The swabs were put into a testing machine to be examined for explosives. The male agent injected a little humor about the book I was planning to read on the plane: Conflict Without Casualties, as he apparently recognized the irony of this situation. One of the female agents ran a wand around my outline, then front and back, then put on rubber gloves and patted down every inch of my body after asking if I wanted to be taken to a private room for this. No, that wouldn't be necessary. She swabbed the gloves, and put the swab into the bomb detector machine. As the clock ticked, I wondered if I was ever going to get out of there and onto my plane.

After what seemed like an eternity, I was handed my shoes, laptop and backpack and told I could leave, since I'd passed the checkpoint. As I was tying my shoes, I heard another manager ask another agent about going and taking the ATS or whatever it was training, and I watched an agent patting down another agent. I wondered if they were in training mode. I also wondered if Sarge wasn't an auditor, out to show people how things should be done. 

I learned a few things that day.

First, Rhode Island Temporary Licenses actually do say receipt on them. Despite the fact that it has a photo, signature, indicator of organ donor status, it does not say temporary license on it. DL does not count. I think I shall make a call to the people at the registry about that.

Second, if you are training someone, don't make a spectacle out of a customer. I suppose the TSA doesn't consider the people they inspect to be customers. Their job is to screen for the riff-raff and any other suspicious activity. However, I felt sub-human during this process as orders were barked at me. Perhaps that is an intimidation tactic, and had I been in the military, might have dealt with a little better. My black male friends tell me stories of being treated like this because of their skin color. I have a ton more empathy now.

Finally, always travel with a passport. Or your Costco Card.

What about you? What travel nightmares have you experienced? Share your story in the comments.

Then we began the excuses and dismissals for people who had relatives involved in a trial, the jobs that would create hardship, the grandmother traveling overseas for the birth of a child who would miss several months, etc, and one by one, the pool diminished and a replacement was added. We were close to being finished, and a "what about...." question arose from a final candidate. She was dismissed, and my name was drawn.  <Cue Perry Mason music> What the heck, I figured. You can always learn something, right? I have fond childhood memories of the Perry Mason theme song playing as I walked down the hall to bed every night. It was one of my grandfather's favorite shows and it came on after the 11:00 news. 

Our training included very stern instructions that we were not to discuss the proceedings of the trial with anyone. Spouse. Mother. Therapist. Nada. No one. It was especially important because this is Rhode Island, and as a small state, six degrees of separation is more like 2.31, so we aren't allowed to talk about the cases. I can tell you that it's like watching a mashup of Law and Order where the case changes at each commercial break. We've had 16 cases so far, and I've filled up three notebooks, which, by the way, must be left in the courtroom, along with the officially appointed court pen. We may not bring our cell phones past the security guards (lest we record something!) though we can house them in a little phone locker with the security staff by the metal detectors and sign them out at lunch. I was jonesing over that the first couple of weeks (How do I tell time?) but I got over that and now don't even bother to bring my iPhone along to sit in the little locker.

You may be wondering, since I can't talk about any of this, what it has to do with learning. LOTS! Let me explain. 

If you've gotten an email from me, you know my email signature quotes Ray Leblond and says, "You learn something every day if you pay attention." My reply signature asks, "What have you learned today?" and when I'm in business mode, I answer my phone, "It's a great day for learning!" so I'm pretty invested in this learning thing. One of the things that has been screamingly obvious to me about court proceedings is that lawyers ask questions to present facts. Not tell stories. It drives me nuts trying to keep a bajillion names, dates and places straight, often with terminology that's brand new to me. Generally, after a couple of hours, the groundwork that has been painstakingly laid down scattered brick by scattered brick comes together, but sheesh, it's an effort. I sit there wishing I had a chart or flow chart or some job aid to help me keep track of things. If they'd just let the witness tell a story!  Nope. It doesn't work that way. Lawyers have specific directions they want the process to move in. Our ah-ha moments must be extracted from the facts, not their insights, I guess.  Perhaps one of you lawyerly people might explain why and enlighten me. This seems much harder it needs to be.

He presents a lecture like the one in the picture with all kinds of formulas and graphs and charts, then jumps into R Studio to show us how to enter the formulas to read the data in the exercise files. Type, click, control+enter and POOF! A bunch of numbers. That mean something. I have no idea what, but to the statistician, are really important. When he's done, we're sent off to take a multiple choice quiz on what he talked about, then complete a series of exercises to repeat what he did on the screen to try it out on our own.

Lucky for me, Coursera embraces competency, and in most courses, allows you to take quizzes multiple times, giving you feedback to help you understand why your selection wasn't correct. (Mine usually aren't since I don't understand 80% of the content in this course.) The best thing this prof  has done is to provide the formulas to correctly calculate things in R in the feedback. (God bless you, Dr. Wobbrock!!) We just have to substitute out the name of the file. This, I can do. I'm not sure why, but it does give me the right answer.

So we're taking things like this:
m = aov(Time ~ Tool, data=ide2)
shapiro.test(residuals(m))
qqnorm(residuals(m)); qqline(residuals(m))

shapiro.test(ide2[ide2$IDE == "Illustrator",]$Time)
shapiro.test(ide2[ide2$IDE == "InDesign",]$Time)

and getting number strings as answers. Can I make the formulas compute the numbers? Yup! Do I understand what I'm doing? Nope. Could I take a data set and figure out how to do something with it, selecting the right test and plotting the correct syntax to get it? Not on your life.

​I shall pass this course, but only because of the help given in the feedback of the wrong answers. Do I know statistics? Nope. Not really much of an inkling. My big picture definition says that statistics is a method of validating that something is different from something else using a plethora of named tests that identify something unique for each one. There are t-tests and p scores and variables. I'm not sure I'm ready to put it into the bin with calculating ROI formulas yet, but it's pretty close. Maybe one of my geeky friends reading this can enlighten me on the value of all this. But it has given me some interesting insights on learning, and what we should and should not do in our learning. 

I often wonder why we don't talk to one another much between K12, higher ed, early childhood and training. Granted, a key difference is the focus on children vs. adults, but there are excellent synergies that we can leverage between one another. That's why I pay attention to them all in my Twitter feed, and it's where I came across the report that sparked this post. I know that creative sparks occur when a novel concept is introduced to the mix, forcing thinking to go in new directions. Edward DeBono uses this in lateral thinking, and calls this process Random Entry. A totally unrelated idea takes our thinking in different directions. 

Here's a great example. In the report's article about learning analytics, Miller & Mork's (2013) value chain for discovery, integration, and exploitation of large-scale data is cited. This comes from an IT perspective,  and in a very simple way, shares how we could leverage the data we collect. A question comes up here: are we collecting the right things? There's considerable effort being invested in data mining of big data, and leveraging xAPI to track user activity. I wonder how much of the thinking in this image would be useful to us as we plan our evaluation strategies. ​I also wonder if having a representative from IT at the table would bring a divergent perspective as we consider evaluation and assessment possibilities so we might better leverage available data.

This is where the concept of bricolage comes in. Bricolage comes from the process of playing with things at hand. Examples include the child who builds a fort out of the sofa cushions, the artist who creates sculpture from household items, the teacher who does crafts with his students using paper towel rolls, and musicians who use spoons or pots and pans as instruments. According to Wikipedia, "Bricolage is a French loanword that means the process of improvisation in a human endeavor. The word is derived from the French verb bricoler ("to tinker"), with the English term DIY ("Do-it-yourself")." I like that. Improvisation in a human endeavor. One of the tenants of improvisation is "Yes, and". Here, the players must agree with whatever the other has started, and build from there. It's leveraging imagination. 

Dictionary.com defines bricolage as 

1. a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things.
2. (in literature) a piece created from diverse resources.
3. (in art) a piece of makeshift handiwork.
4. the use of multiple, diverse research methods.

In education, MIT theorist of constructionism (different from constructivism) and founder of the MIT Media Lab, Seymour Papert was inspired by noting the difference between math class students and art class students carving a bar of soap. He wanted to find a way to teach math that had the inspiration of the soap carvers. Here, the soap leveraged divergent thinking for him, and from it, emerged the Logo software that allowed students to explore math concepts in a hands on fashion. He looked at problem solving in two ways: rather than being analytical, he deemed the learner a bricoleur, who learned through playing with things. Constructionism is actually learning by making. 

Bricolage is used in managerial and entrepreneurial literature, and seems to be tied with creativity. There's a difference though. It seems that bricolage is the result of problem solving. With the fort, the child wanted to create a hiding place, and improvised. The music maker had no drums, so the pot was inverted to become the percussionist's tool. It's a form of problem solving through experimentation.

The designer then brainstorms many solutions, narrows focus to one solution, and creates a prototype, which is presented to the user for feedback. The feedback is applied and the design is reworked until an appropriate solution is created that is feasible for the designer and solves the user's problem.

​In design thinking, the user is central. This process is the way new products are created, originating from the research and development teams in organizations, but it is being increasingly adopted in other areas of the business. The buzz is growing around design thinking, hitting the mainstream in the September 2015 issue of the Harvard Business Review last year. In the lead article, Design Thinking Comes of Age, Jon Kolko, VP of Design at Blackbord says, ​

What applicability do we see between instructional design and design thinking? Are there things we might leverage too?
​
If you're new to Design Thinking, check out the free crash course available from the dSchool at Stanford or their resource page for methods.

How can we address this as instructional designers?

In traditional instructional design, we leverage ADDIE or SAM methodologies or a variation of one of them to solve business problems. We work through a similar process to develop our ideas, iterating with our SMEs to find a workable solution. Sadly, in much of what we create in our world, the content is in the center. SAM gets a little closer to design thinking methodology with its iterative process, but are we really providing a solution to the problem at hand the way we are designing learning today?

In Julie Dirksen's brilliant book, Design for How People Learn, she says  “In most learning situations, it’s assumed that the gap is information – if the learner  just had the information, then they could  perform” (2011, p5). As most of us know, more information will not necessarily solve the problem. Information is readily available. We need to teach people what to do with the information; to apply it to solve a problem. I may know how to drive a car, but it doesn't do much for me if I never actually drive a car. If there is no transfer out of the learning situation, what good is it? Sure, compliance may be happy that the box is checked, but shouldn't it be more than that? 

People forget what we've been trying to teach them in training because there is no direct connection to the user. We aren't necessarily solving a problem for them, but for the business. Until we can help the learner recognize the value of the solution for themselves personally, they will not adopt the solution we have designed for them. Here is where knowing and understanding the user/learner's need comes into play. They gotta wanna. We need to motivate them beyond "because the regulators/compliance/your boss says you need to" if we want learning to be sticky. That's designing for the user and their needs.

As a kid, you did things because your mother told you that you needed to, perhaps because it was good for you. You may not have realized that value until you became an adult. Now you recognize that brushing your teeth and changing your clothes has personal value, so you do it for yourself. We can't motivate our learners like our mothers did. We need them to know why, as well as how. We want them making connections to their world and looking for ways to apply things.  Let's remember that in our design work.
​