lifeandlearning

The first entry for 2018! Hope this year brings greater success and accomplishments. In the first entry for this year i would like to talk about the importance of relevance of subject material when developing a learning program. One of my pet peeves when designing and developing a learning program is where the program manager comes in and says "looks good but I think we need to make it more robust". Now to be clear, I have nothing against making learning more robust per se and on some occasions I have realised that what I had developed needed to be made more robust. However, I have trouble with those occasions when the program manager or the SME (but mostly program manager) wants to pad things up so that they can justify the costs involved in developing the program. Relevant content is so important in ensuring that the learning is effective, despite this when it comes time to develop training programs certain stakeholders insist on putting irrelevant stuff in so that t...

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, ...