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Learning about learning

is God Dead?

1/27/2018

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God is Dead. Really?

I was in the car, driving between appointments listening to Origin by Dan Brown. I really like Dan Brown's work, even if he tends to lean on the scientific notion that there is no God. He focuses on the tension between religion and science, and gives me things to ponder. His works are suspenseful and keep the reader (or in this case, listener) engaged. At this point in the story, Robert Langdon, the protagonist, is trying to unleash his friend's profound scientific discovery aborted by his untimely assassination at the release party. He is at his friend's home with the heroine of the story, discussing Nietzsche, and this quote comes up: "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."
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God is dead.
God remains dead.
​​And we have killed him.   
​ ​-Frederich Nietzsche, 1882
I thought, "Right. In the eyes of those who don't believe in God, He is dead. They have killed the concept of Him by denying His existence. That doesn't mean He doesn't exist." I wondered what the context of Nietzsche's statement was, so I looked it up. 

​The statement comes from a parable in his book The Gay Science, ​published in 1882, and reads like this:

The Madman

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"....

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It's All in the Details

7/1/2017

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Recently, I decided that I wanted to turn one of the rooms in my house into a studio, so I purchased this nifty artist's desk at Jerry's Artarama. It was everything I wanted for my watercolor work and even better, I got a discount as a frequent shopper. The bad news was that my purchase came with a few major challenges. I learned a bunch about learning in this process, so let's see how this all fits together.

Hurdle #1 - Getting it home

Said desk came in a very large box that I couldn't pick up so the nice people at Jerry's wrestled it into my compact car, which in and of itself was no easy task. When I got home, the box was neatly wedged into the back seat of my car and wasn't budging when I tried to extract it, so I called my neighbor to see if he could help.
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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.

HURDLE #2 - Getting it to where I needed it

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.

Hurdle #3 - Putting it all Together

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.

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What happens in vegas....

11/19/2016

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GETS SHARED!

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.

dAY ONE: Adobe

My first day was a pre-con day focused on Adobe products. We saw what's upcoming with Captivate, and I'm pretty excited to see the advances in responsive design they are working on. There was a great demo using serving trays that showed how that worked. I understand the concept so much better.

STORYBOARDING
I went to a workshop on Storyboarding with Sarah Gilbert, who shared storyboards from Pixar and Martin Scorcese. She was demonstrating Adobe's Storyboarding app, Captivate Draft. It's and iPad tool that lets you create on the fly and use for demos for getting buy on. She also shared her process' which was in total alignment with the workshop I would be delivering the next day on the lessons we can learn from UX. She begins with a content map using a MindMap, then a content outline, sketches, wire frames, a mood board to show the colors and feel of the piece, then goes to prototype. There is huge value in this method, because you get signoff at each layer, allowing people to focus on specifics.
LESSONS FROM A STARTUP
The keynote opener was Dan Lyons, a journalist, who shared his gleanings of getting laid off at 52, then attempting to reinvent himself in a startup. He recognized that he knew a lot, but much of it would not serve him. He painfully realized this when he was hired at Hubspot, a classic startup learning to invent itself on the fly. It has all of the wonky elements we think of with this Google-esque culture and was a major contrast from the world of journalism.
In particular, I loved their defining culture of having heart: people who are humble, effective, adaptable, remarkable and transparent. I tweeted his lessons learned and it resonated with many and is still being retweeted 4 days later.
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.... :)
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Synergies, Innovation and #TLDC16

10/6/2016

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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.

Synergies

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.


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Let me just Bang my head against the Steel Silo

7/14/2016

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When one is used to working and cultivating a collaborative group that readily shares information, it is a rude awakening to return to the land of silos and secrets. I recently worked on a project where command and control was the [unspoken] expectation, and as part of my needs assessment, I DARED speak with employees outside of L&D and was taken to task for it. "We don't do it what way around here. You must ask permission to speak to people in the business lines." Huh? I thought we were all on the same team here. The people I spoke to were fine with my inquiries, and I gathered some robust insights, but since I hadn't played "Mother May I?" I was reprimanded with an attitude of "How DARE you!" and those insights, I'm sure, will wind up in a dust bin.

It puzzles me. What are you so afraid of, folks?

The Way Things Could Work

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From Harold Jarche, From Knowledge Worker to Master Artisan
I've grown accustomed to the world of sharing what I learn without expectation of return, willingly asking for help, and offering help when needed. I've even taken the risk of working out loud and showing my work (Thank you Shannon Tipton and Jane Bozarth!) and learned from others who have done likewise.

Harold Jarche's recent blog From Knowledge Worker to Master Artisan was a great recap of how things could (and should) be, and a place for me to reground myself to move back to normalcy. He advocates for Personal Knowledge Mastery or PKMastery, and has developed a model of Seek > Sense > Share. 
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.
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You Can't Make This Stuff Up

5/27/2016

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Yesterday I was returning home from the ATD Conference in Denver and participated in a unique customer experience that I suspect will make a good case story someday. We start with the rental car shuttle dropping me off at the baggage claim, which meant schlepping all over the airport to find ticketing. The airline I was on was new, had one gate, and minimal signage, so there was extra schlepping involved. Once I found it, checked my bag an got my boarding pass, SCORE!!! I was TSA Pre-Check. 
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For the uninitiated, this meant that I got to go through the security line without removing my shoes, laptop, jacket and additional hassles related to the security checkpoint. HUZZAH!!! I was psyched.
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.

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The Marvels of Moocs

5/5/2016

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About five years ago I attended a higher ed workshop where the panelists introduced MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) and were discussing their potential impact on higher ed. There was a note of panic in their voices, because, after all, MOOCs are free and the mooc providers were "giving learning away", which might interrupt the revenue stream (read cash cow) in higher ed. The MOOC providers continued to publish, and the learners kept learning. You can read some interesting stats about them in Class Central's 2015 analysis of MOOC trends. 

Who's Taking Them and What are people learning in MOOCs?

Since 2011, over 4200 MOOCs have been created and at least 35 million people have signed up for at least one according to Class Central's 2015 report. Coursera, the leader, has 17 million students on their rolls. That's nothing to sneeze at! Subjects vary, but for the most part there's a MOOC for just about anything you'd want to learn. What's been interesting is that the demographics of MOOC users are roughly about 1/3 high school grads, 1/3 college grads and 1/3 those with graduate degrees. For the most part, MOOCs aren't about the credits, but about the learning. That's key for us.
MOOCs aren't about the credits. They're about the learning.
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2015 MOOC course distribution, according to Class Central

What can we learn from MOOCs?

There are some big lessons for us as designers around the popularity of the MOOC.

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How NOT To Learn Something

4/26/2016

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Last September, my name came up in some official roll-of-the-dice selection process and I got the authoritative dispatch informing me I had been selected for jury duty. I dutifully reported to the courthouse as required only to discover this was no ordinary sit around, read a book, knit a scarf and maybe get picked one day jury. 
 This was the Grand Jury at the Federal Level, and those who were selected for the honor would be committed to a full year of service, reporting to the courtroom every other Tuesday for a year.  There were 58 of us, and they needed to select 23 jurors and 6 alternates, so I figured I had a 50/50 chance of missing the winner's circle on this one. They pulled 29 names mine wasn't included. Phew.
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. 

Sworn to Secrecy

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.

So What Does This Have to Do with Learning?

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

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Innovating Learning: Bricolage

4/22/2016

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I was fishing around for something on my computer today, and came across the 2014 Innovating Pedagogy Report put out by the Institute for Educational Technology at The Open University. This report is created for teachers rather than designers and corporate training people, but it is interesting to see the trends that were identified in K12 education a year and a half ago. They include:
  • Massive Online Open Learning
  • Learning Design Informed by Analytics
  • Flipped Classroom
  • BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
  • Learning to Learn
  • Dynamic Assessment
  • Event-based Learning
  • Learning Through Storytelling
  • Threshold Concepts 
  • Bricolage
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Bricolage 01 by Leonard Clagett
I find it curious how many of those trends exist in today's world of instructional design and elearning. Normally, the orbits of higher ed, K12, and corporate training spin in different realms, but there appears to be a convergence here. We are all chattering about storytelling and the value of assessment, MOOCs, analytics and the flipped classroom and troubled by BYOD. If you look at a conference brochure, you'll see lots of things about these concepts. The methods of improving our education & training all include examine a variety of components: knowing what is needed (in our world, gap analysis), delivery of content, application of content, and measuring the learners' absorption of it. It seems as though we are focused on the delivery and assessment these days. 

Leveraging Technology

Since the advent of readily accessible technology, we have online learning and measurement options available to us, and educators and trainers attempt to effectively incorporate technology as it has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. We all experiment with things, examine the results, talk about them, tweak them, and hopefully improve what was. I know in my 40 years of teaching, I've seen lots of things change. I've tried things that worked well and things that flopped. Yet people still learned. How much, well, that's the fly in the ointment.

​Two hundred years ago, there was the chalkboard, classroom, a teacher imparting knowledge, and lots of reading and rote memorization. We view that as primitive, yet it takes effort to read most 19th century literature because of the dense vocabulary and long sentences. Those writers were schooled in that "primitive" classroom and have language skills that far surpass what we have today. Their methods worked. Do I suggest we return to that? No. There is so much more to learn today. There's so much more available to us with the world at our fingertips on a computer. School systems need to decide what must be in the canon imparted to children, parsing out of that enormous mass of ideas to assemble a stable curriculum. Similarly, in corporate training, we struggle to figure out what the learner really needs, despite our subject matter expert's insistence that they need the trunkful of material they toss over the wall for us to put in a 10 minute elearning module. 

We Really Should Leverage Cross Disciplinary Conversation

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.
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The Value of Bricolage

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.
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Don't let the problem become a stopping point. Look for the "Yes, and" as well as the "How might we" to leverage what's at hand to build the next bricolage for learning.
In our world, bricolage includes blended learning, mLearning, elearning, and MOOCs. The solution came about to meet a need. Learners are attached to their smartphones, which makes computing portable, so we leverage that through mLearning. We need to eliminate costs for some training, so we improvised via webinars, or create blended components so there is less seat time.  These examples have been around for a while, and solved the "How might we" questions used in the world of UX. We answer with a solution that's a mashup of common tools used in a new paradigm. What was new, is now commonplace. 

Education is continually working to reinvent and improve itself and supplement what is already in place. As my grandmother used to say, "Necessity is the mother of invention." 
"How might we" is an excellent starting point to solve a problem.  Designers look at people, problems and solutions. What do we need to build next? Don't let the problem become a stopping point. Look for the "Yes, and" as well as the "How might we" to leverage what's at hand to build the next bricolage for learning.

How might we do what we do better? What's in your toolkit that could spur a new way? It doesn't always need to be something new. Bricolage comes from leveraging what's at hand. What can you combine to create better learning?
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Pondering the Design Process

4/14/2016

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I came across this interesting design model in a post from @TeachThought on the Design Cycle and the Genius Hour. This comes from Nigel Coutts (@ncoutts) who writes in the K12 teacher space on education trends, better thinking and the maker movement, among other things. The model is intended for classroom teachers working with design. It provides guidance to help children think like designers do, showing steps in the process and the interrelationships between them. It is important to note that it begins with identify the problem.

This model has roots in the Design Thinking process, which comes out of Stanford University. The graphic most often associated with their process looks like the image below. 
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Image from The Genius Hour Design Cycle: A Process For Planning
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Image from Stanford Design School

Design Thinking

Design thinking follows a process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test. ​The first step is about understanding the user, empathizing with their needs and pain points. Next, a problem is defined that originates out of the user experience.
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, ​
There’s a shift under way in large organizations, one that puts design much closer to the center of the enterprise. But the shift isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about applying the principles of design to the way people work. This new approach is in large part a response to the increasing complexity of modern technology and modern business....[A] design-centric culture transcends design as a role, imparting a set of principles to all people who help bring ideas to life.
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.
Design thinking is about creating solutions to problems. The user is always a central focus.
Instructional design should be the same, but most often the content winds up in the starring role.
How can we address this as instructional designers?

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    Jean Marrapodi

    Teacher by training, learner by design.

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