lifeandlearning

A few days ago, I was chatting with my colleague. During the chat this colleague mentioned that they have access to a grant which can enable them to do a masters qualification in their field (IT related). However they were not sure about what topic should they go for. Furthermore the day we were chatting also happened to be the last day when people could enter their name for accessing that grant. I told my colleague that we should develop a mind map, to which they said they do not even know what a mind map is. We were able to get a workable solution for my colleague but it got me thinking about mind maps and what they mean. In this blog post I will talk about these handy little tools so the readers of this blog can become aware of them too. Do let me know if you use mind maps for other things that I may not have covered. To start off, mind maps are often described as brainstorming tools where ideas and concepts can be represented graphically but what does it really mean. It means

I first came across the words Design Thinking in 2015 in an article. At the time I did not understand what design thinking was at all. Didn’t understand the article and didn’t understand the concept. In 2016, I started coming across the words “Design Thinking” more and more frequently. Saw people on LinkedIn raving about how it has led to innovation in their company and how it has completely changed how they used to approach things. Words like paradigm, fostering innovation and cultural change were routinely used wherever a mention of design thinking was made. So, I tried to take some more interest and a few things started to make sense about design thinking and gradually I started to understand what the excitement is all about. I will share my understanding of this concept below. Design thinking is a concept that is very much used in several fields but has especially been embraced in the related fields of instructional/learning design and user experience. Design thinking is a con

The modern lifestyle can be quite stressful, despite all the technological conveniences at our disposal now. Sometimes, I feel it is stressful because of these so called conveniences. I have often thought of things that are stressful in our lives and in the past few years, I have been educating myself on stress. In fact identifying my stressors and managing my stress has become a bit of a focus area in recent years. Since emotional intelligence and well being is a favourite topic of mine, I thought I should write another entry related to it. Have you ever been in a situation where you felt simply overwhelmed by all that was going on around you and all that you had to complete or achieve? How about that uneasy feeling back in school or university when you had your examinations the next week and you realised you simply were not adequately prepared? Or how about that feeling when you had to make a presentation in front of senior management? That feeling is called stress. The Australi

I do not have a background in visual design, but recently I have been given a project which has required me to study a bit about visual design (and Adobe Indesign- but that's another conversation). In doing my research into principles of visual design, and some day I will write about that as well, I came across the principle of Gestalt. Gestalt principle has applications in both visual design and problem solving, but I will only talk about the visual design application. In keeping with my overall effort to keep my blog Jargon and technicality free, I will present what Gestalt is. Gestalt – is a German word that when translated means shape or form. Gestalt principle and indeed the larger Gestalt psychology is formed around how we perceive visual objects and motion. Gestalt principle is often used in visual design to manipulate and inform visual perception and to gain viewer’s focus. This is done by designing the visual arrangement in a manner that feels more connected and compl

If you are in any way connected with digital learning you would have certainly heard the words xAPI by now. I had heard the words xAPI for a good six months or so before I actually understood what it stood for. xAPI stands for experience API (That's where the X comes from). It is also known by another name called Tin can API. So what is xAPI and why is it all the rage nowadays? OK maybe it's not so much as a rage but I think it certainly qualifies as "an interesting topic" among training and development professionals. API stands for application programming interface and can be described as a list of commands that one computer program sends to another to provide and retrieve information. API is how two software "talk" to each other. API makes it possible for us to browse the internet transfer information from one software to another, do coding etc. xAPI is an API developed by Advanced Distributed Learning , a part of US department of defence. xAPI is a

This blog post is going to be a bit different. Instead of the usual learning theory concepts that I talk about, I will be talking about a concept which sounds familiar but one which most people lack a deep understanding about. I had recently had an opportunity to research about emotional intelligence. Before I started researching my mental thoughts were Oh I know about it and a lot of things that I came across were known to me but there were certain things that I had never thought about or associated with emotional intelligence. The term Emotional Intelligence was first coined by researchers Peter Salvoy and John Mayer in their 1990 article called Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality. In their article, they described emotional intelligence as “a set of skills hypothesized to contribute to the accurate appraisal and expression of emotion in oneself and in others, the effective regulation of emotion in self and others and the use of feelings to motivate,

In my last blog entry I talked about learning design. Today I want to talk about a related concept called UX. A part of me thinks that UX is and should be considered as a part of learning design but having talked to a number of people about this, I have arrived at the conclusion that these two concepts are thought of as related but separate so will happily leave it at that. UX refers to  u ser e x perience and is how a person (user) feels when they use a product or service or interface with a system. The key word here being experience. UXD refers to  u ser e x perience  d esign and encompasses factors such as: how usable (and useful) the product is how will the user interact with the product  how accessible the product is  how visually pleasing it is  how easily and intuitively it can be used by the customer.                                                                   The overall focus with UXD seems to be to address all areas of

For the last couple of years, I have increasingly come across the words learning design. Superficially it appeared to me just another name for instructional design or perhaps instructional design underwent a branding exercise and is now reborn as learning design. However, on scratching the surface I found that there are differences, subtle differences perhaps but differences nonetheless. So, what is learning design and how is it different from instructional design? Actually, before we get to that let's think about what does a design do? A design aims to solve a problem for the user by taking in consideration the user's requirements. Think of interior design - It is a solution for how you want your home or office to be given your life/work style. Furniture design aims to solve a problem for the targeted users. And so on and so forth. So, learning design is about providing solutions to learning requirements of the learner. But isn't that what we do in instructional des

Today I had a meeting with a prospective client regarding the development of some eLearning resources. During the meeting, the client mentioned that they wanted the resources to be interactive and asked me if I would be able to incorporate some gamification in them. Two simple requirements but at the opposite ends, from a functional perspective. I asked the client what was their idea of interactivity. Their response was that I should add in "some kind of tabs that the learners would need to click or some other things which would make the learner interact with the course". Now, granted, click on tabs would technically qualify as interactivity but is this really the sort of interactivity that actually leads to learning and retention? My view is that this type of interactivity would hinder rather than aid learning and is no better than courses that put the  next  button at the bottom of every slide. The end result being that the learner, instead of focussing on the learning

The learning pyramid, also known as the cone of learning shows the different instructional methods and how much learning is retained by learners when employing those instructional methods. The development of learning pyramid is credited to Edgar dale. The top four instructional methods in the learning pyramid are described as passive methods and the bottom three are described as active methods. Also, I am not quite sure if group discussions should come under active methods, as I have sat through many group discussions just sitting there and listening to others and then promptly forgetting what was discussed in a matter of hours. A lot of interpretations of the learning pyramid can be found online. These interpretations accord a percentage weight to the level of learning retention that is facilitated by each different instructional method. There is some criticism of the learning pyramid around the order of instructional methods as well as the percentages as

The 70:20:10 model is a learning and development model that combines experiential, social and formal learning and explains their relationship to each other. The model is said to have first been developed by Morgan McCall from the center for creative learning. Although there can be different combinations of the model (50:30:20 or 80:10:10) depending on organizational circumstances and requirements the usual interpretation of this model goes something like this: 70% of learning is experiential. People learn by doing something or reflecting on what they have done. It might be their regular job, it might be practice, it might be a simulation or a project or a task force or even simply interacting with clients, as long as it involves people doing what they need to do to do their job effectively. 20% of learning is social learning. Social learning takes place with co-workers, friends, and others in an individual's personal network. It may include asking a friend to show you how t

In this blog post, i would like to talk about scenario based learning. Scenario based learning puts the learner in a real life scenario or in a situation/simulation that depicts real life as closely as possible. The central idea being that learner is put into a situation which requires them to consider a wide range of factors and take appropriate decisions. The advantage of this is that learners develop critical skills (and their confidence) that they would need in order to effectively do their job. Another advantage is that because the learning involves a particular context (one that the learner is likely to use in their actual job), the learner is able to better understand the learning and commit it to their long term memory. Scenario based learning is based on situational learning theory, which was first discussed by Jean lave and Etienne Wenger in 1991. Scenario based learning generally involves providing the learners with a narrative that introduces the learner to the scenario

In this post, i would like to talk about Minimalism. The minimalism theory was first introduced by JM Caroll. Minimalism is a task-oriented instructional approach that discourages passive reading or listening and encourages self-directed learning by exposing the learner to job relevant and realistic activities for effective learning experiences. The theory gets its name by "minimizing" the use of lengthy reading material or lectures. The principles of the Minimalism theory are: All learning tasks should be meaningful learners should be provided realistic tasks and projects as soon as possible learning instruction should permit (and encourage) self-directed reasoning and improvising by increasing the number of active learning activities training materials and activities should provide for error recognition and recovery there should be a close linkage between the training and the actual system The theory (and the instructional model based on the theory) exert

I first came across the experiential learning theory a few years ago when I was doing my Masters qualification in Human resource management. To be honest I couldn't make much sense of it at that time. Part of it can be attributed to how it was presented to us learners and part of it, my own lack of enthusiasm in understanding it. There was barely any context around the concept which, in my opinion, caused it to come across as somewhat abstract in nature rather that something relevant and applicable. So what is experiential learning? Experiential learning can be described as learning that is gained by doing something and then reflecting on it. Although learning by doing things has been around since the time human beings have been able to communicate, experiential learning as a formal education approach has been articulated about 50 years ago. Its chief proponent has been David A Kolb who build upon earlier work done by Kurt Lewin and Jean Piaget. Experiential learning is impo

The words learning theory or theories are often bandied about when talking about learning and how people learn. But what are learning theories anyway? Learning theories are theoretical frameworks that outline and explain how people learn. In layman terms, it means there are a number of theories that tell us how people learn and these theories often have different ways of viewing how people learn. There have been times when one theory was considered to be more applicable than others or was more widely accepted to be true than others. It might also be the case with some learning theories that they may not be held in as high an esteem as they were earlier. Whatever may be the case, I think it is useful to know about these learning theories and the idea they represent, in order to form a more refined idea about how people learn. Now there are a lot of learning theories out there so I will talk about the most popular ones as well as the ones that might be known to have the most impac

Pedagogy In my last post, I talked about what motivates someone to learn something. After writing that post I started thinking about the various things that I have learned and why I have learned them. For some reason, my thoughts always wandered towards the formal education that I have undergone.  There were some instances where I was motivated to learn more or find out more about a given topic based on how it was presented to me by the people teaching that topic. This thought, in turn, got me thinking about pedagogy. So what is pedagogy? The word pedagogy comes from the Greek language. In ancient Greece, families often had attendants who would accompany the children of the family to their place of formal learning. These attendants were called  pedagogues and overtime they were tasked with not only escorting the children of the family to their formal learning places but also teach them about rules of behaviour, social interactions and life in general. Nowadays pedagogy is def

I have often wondered what motivates a person to learn something and what triggers that motivation. On one hand, there are the external motivators like career, professional development, job requirements etc. On the other hand, you have internal or intrinsic motivators like curiosity, desire to improve yourself, proving something etc. This is all very academic and can probably be found in a number of psychology textbooks. But what I would like to find out is what are those motivators that create a burning desire in a person to learn something. Are they internal or external, are some motivators greater than others, are situation and timing important aspects to consider? To be clear, I am not talking about flashes of inspiration that most people have from time to time that although pique our interest but ultimately peter out before any real learning happens. I am talking about something that drives us day in and out, gives us a sense of purpose and makes us charge at our learning goal