Allowing yourself to have silly ideas

creativity View Comments
Dec 302004

I just love this post by Curt Rosengren. He’s so right! I carry around a notebook so I can jot down ideas as they occur to me. Sometimes I end up with pages filled with cross-outs, arrows flying all over the place, and little doodles trying to illustrate what i was thinking.

I’ve learned a couple of things from this process. The first is that one’s man’s silly idea is another’s stepping stone to a brilliant idea. The second is that silly thoughts are necessary to help you recognize the good ones. The third is that arrows and doodles make everything make much more sense. (I’m a visual organizer.) I guess I pretty much agree with Curt on this one.

Posted by Rebecca at 8:30 pm

The acquisition of experience

storytelling View Comments
Dec 282004

Recently in elearningpost’s daily newsletter, there was a brief on using one’s experience base to weave inferences and further learning around one’s situation that just bears sharing at least in part.

I watched “The Usual Suspects” again last week….couldn’t help linking the way Keyser Soze, Kevin Spacey’s character, conjured up the story in the interrogation room with the way experts make sense of novel situations….The interrogation takes place in a police officer’s room which has the usual information snippets, newspaper clips and mug shots stuck all over the walls. Soze, the real crook in the movie, uses all the information available in that room to spin a believable story and finally manages to convince the officer of his innocence. This is the same way experts make sense of situations. (Stop your inductive reasoning here: all experts are not crooks!) They use their experience base to interpret the information around them to mentally play out a story. And if the mental story makes sense, they act it out. If it does not make sense, then they revise to balance it out till it does. This entire sensemaking happens in a few seconds or a few minutes timeframe. If Keyser Soze were a novice con man, he would have found it difficult to interpret the information around him, let alone spin a story around it. Here’s my point. A rich experience base is what distinguishes an expert from a novice. One way to build an experience base is to wait for experiences to come to you. This is the natural way. The other way is to create an environment where experiences can be accelerated. This is the realm of training. But how much of our training is based on accelerating experiences? How many training outcomes are based on interpretation and sensemaking capabilities? This is where I feel that business organizations are missing out on a great deal….The very nature of a business organization provides for a fertile ground to accelerate experiences. Knowledge management can provide for the wealth of accumulated experiences to tap from, while training and e-learning initiatives can leverage on this wealth of lived experiences to build environments where sensemaking can be accelerated.

This is addressed from the point of view of the learner, but for us as teachers it’s yet another argument for the need to weave through our lesson planning. The need to weave the lesson components. The need to weave the device that provides the momentum for the course. The need to weave in our own knowledge and background experiences. The need to weave in the learner’s knowledge and background experiences.

Learning isn’t an accident. Ideally, it’s a series of knowledge-building experiences woven together so well that the learner doesn’t realize they’re learning.

Posted by Rebecca at 8:29 pm

Movement and music

creativity, storytelling, teaching View Comments
Dec 232004

I’ve spent a good portion of my life studying ballet. I love to dance. I dance everywhere I can, even when the only music I hear is the music in my head. So, when I had opportunities to build lesson plans around dancing in college, I did so. The first opportunity was in my kinesiology class. We had to create a interdisciplinary lesson plan where one of the disciplines was kinesiology. I taught everybody a dance from Israel.

The second opportunity was a bit more freeform, and is now in my portfolio. When I started, it was something to do with the kids in a museum summer camp. It ended up becoming one of the highlights of my student teaching.

The concept was simple. I wanted to create a program where children could explore and express themselves through moving to music. We had warm-ups that I led through a story, much to the children’s amusement. Then we had activities each time we met.

Some days, we would play charades with cards on which I wrote challenging words like sky, cloud, and relaxing. The child drew a card and then created their own motions to try to convey the idea to the others. It was amazing to see all the ways they came up with to communicate these ideas. Some days, I’d show them various professional dances intended to tell a story or convey a cultural feel. At one meeting, I would do the doll’s dance from The Nutcracker, and they would have to guess what I was. Then, one day, I’d play a handful of pieces for them. They picked a piece of music and decided whether to work in a team or alone. Each team was then challenged to listen again to their piece and decide what story they wanted to tell through their movements to that music.

Being children, they took the challenge to heart and gave us some beautiful stories. We had a spy. We had friends meeting to play. We had one tell us a bit about herself through her dance. It was just freeing to them, and allowed them to learn a little bit more about ways to express themselves.

I’ve often thought that intergrating movement and music programs, especially if you can create a boundary-less program, would be beneficial to just about anyone. Even if all you do is provide an open space and the music and just let the participants do their own thing, I think it can help open their creativity and help them be all right with their ability to express their inner feelings.

Posted by Rebecca at 8:27 pm

Strategy is disciplineless

gaming View Comments
Dec 222004

I tend to watch cartoons based on various card games. A few years ago, it was Digimon. Currently, it’s Yu-Gi-Oh. I also used to play and watch tradeable card games being played with a high degree of frequency. I noticed that those who were successful in one TCG were generally successful at other TCGs or at least learned them very quickly. These players had formulated strategies and then figured out how to employ them across a variety of games.

It should also be noted that these players nearly always did well at non-TCG  where strategy was a key factor, as well.

The same can be said for many disciplines. If you devise a strategy that works in one situation, it can likely be applied or tweaked to work for another. Similarly, if you devise a strategy in one discipline, it will serve you well in other disciplines. This is actually my basis for wishing I could set up a research project involving younger gamers. I can see these (mostly) teenagers, who have developed some lovely strategies and other skills through their gaming hobbies, becoming successful businessmen by applying the strategies they’ve developed as teenagers.

Posted by Rebecca at 8:10 pm Tagged with:

Backwards chaining in corporate training

education View Comments
Dec 212004

I recently started a new job and have been undergoing the necessary training to bring me up to speed. I came at an odd point in the work cycle, so they had to decide where they were going to start training me. Finally, it was decided that they would give me an overview of the Big Picture and then let me start by learning the end of the process.

This ended up not being what happened (instead, I was given the overview and then started in the middle of the process), but it brought to mind a concept that I learned about while working on my thesis a few years ago (has it really been that long?).

There is a concept among the Inuit people called isumaqsayuq, which is defined as “the way of passing along knowledge through observation and imitation embedded in daily family and community activities, integration into the immediate shared social structure being the principal goal. The focus is on values and identity, developed through the learner’s relationship to other persons and to the environment.” (attributed to Arleen Stairs in my notes)

Essentially, these children are trained into the tasks that will become part of their daily lives through this method, also known as backward chaining. They begin at the end of a process, where they learn how to finish the process until they can do it proficiently on their own. Then, they are taught the next earliest part of the process until they can successfully complete it on their own. At this point, the student is expected to handle the process from the new part through to the completion of the process. It continues in this method until the student has learned all the way to the beginning of the process.

I look at that, and I think about how I felt when I thought that was how my training was going to happen. To me, this makes sense. If I am taught in this backward chaining method, then it reduces the time I will ask, “What now?” because I will know what comes next. The learning is not out of context. In fact, it may even make steps easier to learn because I’ll understand why things are done in a certain way because I will already be familiar with the later part of the process that is prepared for by an earlier step.

While backwards chaining may not be possible in all learning ventures, I do have to wonder how many would be made easier if this method was considered.

Posted by Rebecca at 8:07 pm Tagged with: ,

Censorship in these times

reading View Comments
Dec 202004

This morning, I came across this article (log-in required) on the ramifications of censorship in this day and age. If you don’t want to go through with the registration, the article starts with an acceptance speech given by noted children’s author Judy Blume, whose books have helped children face difficult growing-up issues. Her books have been banned from libraries, so she comes to the topic as something of an expert.

However, she’s not just pointing the moral censorship patterns that most commonly come to mind. A growing concern in library blogs and among library patrons is shared as the threat of our reading habits being used against us looms over our heads. Censorship is branching out to include not just those books that challenge our moral beliefs, but also books on any number of normally innocuous topics (the article lists the government, national security, and geopolitics as topics tracked in this new censorship).

It’s something of a commentary on the state of this country when we’re expected to challenge authority in the pursuit of a better way, and yet attempts to learn about the current way are considered as offensive as the normal moral suspects. Tha’s just a bit backwards in my own opinion. Next thing you know, history and classical literature will be deemed the enemy, and instead of burning Harry Potter books they’ll be burning Dan Brown and Tom Clancy novels instead.

Disclaimer: I grew up on Judy Blume’s books and absolutely loved them. I’m not in favor of censorship, but would rather see it replaced with education. I think we’re in danger of moving to a frightening extreme in this country in this regard, and hope we never hit that extreme, whatever it may be.

Posted by Rebecca at 8:05 pm Tagged with:

Integrating tools

web design View Comments
Dec 192004

Today, I downloaded the new version of Trillian. It was a bit trick initially because the entire program wouldn’t download. Then I finally got it downloaded and installed.

I miss the old style. It was sleek and organic. This just looks like old-school MSN Messenger. But I can forgive that after discovering a very neat feature! Some words have a dashed line under them, and I discovered that when I mouse over these words and phrases, a tooltip appears that shows the wikipedia entry for that word or phrase. It is just the niftiest thing I’ve seen. I love it.

Posted by Rebecca at 8:18 am

Make e-Learning relevant

education View Comments
Dec 172004

Since I originally read this article, a blogversation has erupted between Gahran and another blogger. She’s linked to it in this article, and I think it’s worth it to read through the entire conversation.

I’m going through various trainings at my new job this week, one of which included an eLearning course that has been poorly maintained. It was an almost entirely reading training with three brief activities to break up the reading. There were screen shots. Roughly 90% of them did not at all match the text around them, making things a bit more difficult. . Somehow, I did pass the assessment.

At my last desk job before this one, we had numerous classroom and e-Learning options open to us. After several poor learning experiences with our training specialist (great guy, but his teaching style didn’t match any of our learning styles, and the concept of adapting the teaching style was completely foreign to him), many of us turned to the courses on our e-Learning system. This system, run by an out-of-house company, was great. The courses were concise and full of exercises to help promote bite-sized understanding. It was amazing how many of us embraced the e-Learning system because we came away feeling we had learned what we needed.

Posted by Rebecca at 7:58 pm Tagged with:

Feeling a bit more like myself

writing View Comments
Dec 132004

I have been told repeatedly over the past couple of years that I have no initiative. I never take the initiative. I’m overly ambitious but have ambition. It’s a beautiful thing.

I’ll wager that my current job wouldn’t accuse me of such a thing. Today was my second day, and they handed me the handbook that is sort of acting as my training document. I sat there, marked up the entire thing, and offered to re-write any section of it I could. I will get my chance apparently, and the opportunity to work on other dcoumentation for this position. I’m thrilled.

I’m doing logistical work, working with people, and get to work on documentation. All I need is to pick up some training duties once I get settled and this might just be an acceptable job for me after all.

Posted by Rebecca at 7:55 pm

The benefits of online teaching

education View Comments
Dec 072004

I’ve always believed that if you can handle teaching in certain venues, then you have a certain edge over those who have only taught in the classroom. This is especially true for those who teach online classes or prepare instructional units to be self-studied through a computer.

As this article points out, for this group, there is no opportunity to receive those critical non-verbal clues that make teaching the art that it is. This group has to choose their words, language, and lesson structure very carefully. This then carries over into their classroom teaching, allowing them to use that same preciseness to structure learning opportunities, benefiting the students with a more focused learning experience.

Posted by Rebecca at 7:52 pm Tagged with:
Older Entries
© 2010 Rebecca Thomas Designs Suffusion WordPress theme by Sayontan Sinha

Bad Behavior has blocked 72 access attempts in the last 7 days.