“…learning happens when we see how we might do something better by adding some new nuance or expansion to our own understanding. Learning rests on our grasp of what we’re doing well”
Quotes
“It doesn’t matter what we cover, it matters what you discover.”
‐ MIT Physicist
When we immerse ourselves into our craft, then, for that moment, we are connected to everyone else who has ever done it before. How honorable is that? You are not a struggling artist, but someone participating in the same actions, and perhaps facing the same feelings, as Michelangelo and Picasso and O’Keefe. By doing what you are called to do, by doing what you do best, by doing what only you can do in your special way, then you are not just honoring yourself, but you are honoring those that came before you and the sacrifices they made to make your profession even valid.
‐ Poet Mark Nepo
The best way to prepare for the future is to develop the ability to learn and adapt.
‐ Greg Satell
Eexperiences designed to impress or dazzle but end up as eye-candy, edu-tainment or enter-train-ment. Get this – media rich is not mind rich, clicking is not thinking, less in learning is often more.
‐ Donald Clark
Skill = Knowledge + Practice
Different kinds of knowledge may be taught differently: some you can explain, some you have to point out during practice, but as all this knowledge accumulates, it begins to chunk together. At the beginning each item is known inflexibly but through repetition and practice it becomes more flexible the more it coheres with other related items. To become skilled, teach the knowledge they need to be able to practice. Skill can only be acquired through practice.
‐ David Didau
You can reduce cognitive load in eLearning by letting the learner apply each concept with a meaningful interaction. For example, if you need to teach your learners how to use a new, complex system, you could build a series of how-to videos to show them how the system works. But you don’t want to stop there! After each demonstration, include an interactive simulation, challenging the learner to complete a specific task within the new system. Any interaction that requires the learner to apply their critical thinking skills to make a decision, complete a task, or answer a question, will help them retain the information in their long-term memory.
‐ Tim Slade
Kindergarten was designed to be playful and interactive, with kids learning through experimentation and exploration. According to Resnick, the approach remains “ideally suited to the needs” of today—and not just for five-year-olds. Learners of all ages could benefit from the kindergarten approach to the creative process, which typically involves joyfully creating things, destroying them, iterating, collaborating, and trying again. “We need to make the rest of school, the rest of life, more like kindergarten,” Resnick said, “to playfully create things with each other.”
‐ Jenny Anderson
Whatever the name, the basic idea is the same: find out what people are struggling with and build helpful stuff
‐ Nick Shackleton Jones
Our goal is to create realistic, contextual practice activities. We can do that only if we focus on what people need to do. If instead we let knowledge-based objectives distract us, we’ll create the usual information dump followed by a quiz, which is the approach that helps make us irrelevant.
‐ Cathy Moore
Great UX Design is grounded in great user research – driven by user insights while balancing priorities and technical feasibility. User research helps uncover important and useful insights about the user and their needs. Until you know your user and their needs, emotions, feelings, struggles etc, you won’t be able to deliver a great user experience.
‐ Mona Yang
Video games used to have a tutorial at the beginning of the game. Today, they teach you to play the game as you play it (workflow learning). If you need to know what the buttons on the controller do, you can go to the help menu
(performance support).”
‐ Chet Stevenson
A game is a series of interesting choices.
‐ Sid Meier
A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.
‐ Martin LeBlanc
Presentation slides are there to “help your learners see what you’re saying.” This completely changed my view of how I should be using my eLearning slides.
‐ Tim Slade
You can work as hard as you like to create expectations and policies. But the people you begin with–their dreams, their narratives and their habits–are difficult to transform. Start with the right people. Figure out what the market needs and turn that objective into a daily practice, step by step. There’s no such thing as an overnight sustainable success.
‐ Seth Godin
I would really like the industry to embrace design thinking, by which I mean the idea that whether we are procuring learning systems or designing learning content, we should put the employee experience at the heart of the process.
‐ Nick Shackleton-Jones
The most important aspect of a learning project is determining what will help learners perform better and then how to reach them to do so.
‐ Melissa Milloway
In the workflow, context is king, and it drives more of a support mentality than a training one. It’s not to say that training can’t be consumed in the workflow, but it’s often not the type of solution the learner is looking for. It’s overly structured, takes too long to consume and is knowledge focused. Support assets are typically brief, solution oriented and performance focused.
‐ Bob Mosher
AR is great because it enhances learning, which allows for better comprehension and makes it possible to replicate experiences that would be difficult to repeat. However, it’s important to ensure that you’re using technology for the right reason, and not just because it’s cool.
‐ Justin Mitchell
Good design is a solution that combines technology, usability, user needs, and visual arts to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.
‐ Dizparada
It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
‐ Steve Jobs
Design thinking is an approach for deeply understanding the audience and their challenges, in order to generate creative and effective solutions.
‐ Connie Malamed
LX design is the intersection of several areas of design: instructional design; user experience design; and user interface and visual design. It embraces elements of design thinking, user-centered, and universal design. Each of these skills focuses on different aspects of an eLearning module; when all areas are given the proper attention and skillfully honed, the result is engaging, effective eLearning.
‐ Pamela Hogle
“Learning” by definition means “behavior change” – if you haven’t changed behavior, then you have not learned. Instructional Design is a discipline; its output is instruction; not learning. Instruction is often necessary to learning, but alone not sufficient.
‐ Trish Uhl
What is the last thing you want your learners to be doing in training before they go back to their work? We want people to be practicing what they’ve learned, and hopefully practicing in as realistic a way as possible. Of course!
‐ Michael Allen
Learning is a lasting change in a person’s knowledge or behaviour as a result of experiences of some kind. Even when you read, it’s the mind reflecting, making links, calling up related thoughts that makes the experience a learning experience. The way to make such systems work is to focus on effortful ‘learning’ experiences, not just media production. We know that what counts is effortful, desirable and deliberate practice.
‐ Donald Clark
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
‐ William Deresiewicz
Build resources not (short) courses.
‐ Nick Shackleton-Jones
Here’s the biggest mistake in instructional design: presenting too much information. And what that means is that we are using up time that we might use to provide realistic practice, and spaced repetitions, and reflections, and things that really solidify learning, and support learners in their attempt to learn and remember it. Let’s say we’re teaching 20 key things. If we teach all 20, and people remember 5 of them, is that better than teaching them 10 things and having them remember 8 of them?
‐ Will Thalheimer
“Most corporate planning is like a ritual rain dance. It has no effect on the weather, but those who engage in it think it does. Much of the advice and instruction is directed at improving the dancing, not the weather”
‐ Russel L. Ackoff
Memorising facts can build the foundations for higher thinking and problem solving.
‐ Marc Smith
Perfection is the enemy of progress.
‐ Winston Churchill
Learning will always be about human performance.
‐ Rob Lauber
Training is an Event. Learning is a Process. Technology supports Both. Improved Performance is the Goal.
‐ TLDC
Important work is easily dismissed by the audience. It involves change and risk and thought. Popular work resonates with the people who already like what you do. Viral work is what happens when the audience can’t stop talking about what you did. Every once in awhile, all three things will co-exist, but odds are, you’re going to need to choose.
‐ Seth Godin
“Methodology always trumps Technology!”
‐ Bob Mosher
‐ Clark Quinn
If you can stay true, asking open questions with integrity and following a gap analysis process, you can do enormous good in the organisation.”
‐ Nigel Harrison
“One of the crucial leadership skills for today and future is ability to learn constantly from various high quality sources, synthesizing information and collaborating with a community to get a better grasp of the constantly changing reality.” (source)