Curriculum assessment aligns across many platforms.  It begins with course learning outcomes, integrates with program learning outcomes, and ultimately falls under institutional learning outcomes.  Understanding Learning Outcomes Manager (LOM) helps each instructor to join the...Continue Reading »

Ever get that puzzled look from on-site students or get peppered with emails from online students when you talk about critical thinking?  It takes hard work to effectively practice this important academic skill, yet  students...Continue Reading »

Interview with Bryan Alexander, educator, futurist, speaker, writer, and senior researcher for the New Media Consortium (NMC). We discuss the future of higher education.We discuss: NMC 2016 Horizon Report for Higher EducationTime-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or LessBring Your Own Device (BYOD) Learning Analytics and Adaptive Learning Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three YearsAugmented and Virtual RealityMakerspaces & 3D PrintingTime-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five YearsAffective ComputingRoboticsFuture Trends ForumLinksBryan Alexander Consulting, LLCFuture Trends ForumAudrey WattersGoogle CardboardApprenNetAtlas - Next Generation RobotDouble Bot iPad: Virginia Tech Innovation SpacePodsafe music selection from Music AlleyFrom the Beginning by Emerson, Lake & Palmer, from their Then & Now Live 1998 AlbumDuration: 32:35

  Soft skills are generally considered to cover a range of internal, interpersonal and emotion based skills. This is usually in the context of interacting with others or less tangible qualities such as thinking. This may make soft skills appear more complex, tacit and nebulous than technically oriented skills such as data analysis or using software.

In an always-on, constantly connected digital environment, the appreciation of solitude is becoming a dying art. Yet some of life’s richest rewards result from periods of solitude — or what author Michael Harris refers to as absence. In The End of Absence, Harris explores the benefits and risks of today’s digital existence. In doing so, he both warns readers of the consequences of the impending end of absence and offers thoughtful insights on how to recapture the solitude that threatens to be lost forever in a digital world. According to Harris: The digitization of society has created the end of absence. As digital technology becomes ubiquitous, individuals lose the opportunity to enjoy silence and solitude. New technology is always a trade-off. Whenever there is new technology, consideration must always be given to what will be gained and what will be lost. In the digital age, absence must be engineered. Because people (young people in particular) are constantly bombarded by digital input, individuals must plan periods of solitude. Solitude cannot be left to chance. Technology changes the brain. The brain is "plastic" in the sense that its functioning can be altered. Using digital technology has been shown to change neural patterns in the brain. The Internet dilutes expertise. Information- and opinion-sharing technology allows anyone, and thus, no one, to be an expert. Access to everything encourages the exploration of nothing. Because the digital world serves up a constant deluge of increasingly personalized information, individuals have become passive and do not explore new material. Absence is a choice. Controlling the use of digital technology is up to each individual. To learn more, please visit http://www.bizsum.com

This short essay by Dr Simon Western addresses Jacques Lacan’s famous comment "don’t give up on your desire". The first part discusses the meaning of this statement, and also how it is misread. The second part offers a coaching case study to show a practical application. "Don’t give up on your desire" is often misunderstood as a social injunction that tells us to strive to get whatever we want….with our consumer culture shaped super-ego’s screaming at us "you deserve it… your entitled to be happy!"   This misreading reflects a growing entitlement culture that underpins how consumer-capitalism works, for unless people are constantly feeling a desire for something they wouldn’t buy goods and services?   However, Lacan was saying was something quite different to this popular misreading of his work. Lacan was exposing two gaps, the first between our unconscious ‘true’ desire and the ‘false’ desire of our ego. As what we consciously think we desire and what we really/unconsciously desire are often very different and competing desires.   This explains why people get such pleasure-out-of-their-displeasure that is they complain about something, but they clearly get an unconscious pleasure as they remain very attached to it and refuse change their relation to this behaviour or action when offered alternatives. In psychoanalytic terms we say they have a libidinal attachments and investments in this way of being. Lacan was also showing us the gap between our own desire and the desire of the other which may account for why so many of us struggle to find deep contentment in today’s "society of commanded enjoyment" i.e. today there is a social command that it is our duty to be happy, and if we are not happy something is wrong with us and we are failing both ourselves and others. The task of coaching clients in this space is to help them free themselves from the happiness imperative, which paradoxically means not to give up their true desire (see https://www.academia.edu/20054311/Free_yourself_from_the_happiness_imperative .) When we are busy chasing false ‘ego-desires’ and the desire of the other and expecting it to make us happy we are always left feeling a little empty.  We buy the new car or dress and get the face-lift and we feel good for a fleeting moment then get that empty feeling that haunts us in today’s world.  This is because the experience of lack quickly returns- and so we desire some new product or service to fill the space. That’s how consumer capitalism works. If we managed to fulfill our desires we would no-longer buy the stuff, or work like demons to chase our imaginary dreams. The Buddha teaches along these lines but with a difference.  The many variations of Buddhist teaching tell us that desire is the root of our unhappiness, the cause of suffering and evil http://www.buddhanet.net/4noble12.htm The Buddhists teach that to end our suffering is to lose our desire and our ego. This may be one solution to solving the problem of the human condition but let’s be honest, how many of us get anywhere close to this?   And is it really possible or desirable to lose desire and ego? Whilst excess of both can lead to problems having desire and ego are also important drivers of creativity and progressive social (and personal) change, as well as feeding an array of what may be negative effects.    Also there is a strong critique of Buddhism as appropriated by the west, which claims that it becomes distorted and is used instrumentally.   Mindfulness for example, has become the desired corporate training method of the day, as it helps employees with their stress levels and at the same time helps to create a compliant, uncritical and hardworking workforce. Buddhism and it’s derivative Mindfulness can be used instrumentally and out of context, to help produce the perfect corporate worker transforming us from being questioning subjects who resist coercion and strive for the common good, to becoming mindfully pacified, conformist employees. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/22/western-buddhism Our desire is the desire of the other. Lacan identifies how desire is not something that comes from deep within us but is thrust upon us from early encounters with the other. Our ‘true’ desire is thus found via the unconscious and it is a social desire.  From our infancy our desire is to fulfil the desire of the other (mummy or daddy) and we spend most of our lives repeating whatever patterns we fall into as infants. Put another way, our desire is caused by the others lack (remembering lack causes desire) http://www.lacanonline.com/index/2010/05/what-does-lacan-say-about-desire/ What is your Desire? A Key Coaching Question When coaching senior leaders, I often open with this particular question: "What is your desire?". On the surface it is a question that provokes an instant response - our ego response - I desire success, I desire happiness, I desire promotion.   This opening question is also purposefully a little unsettling and disruptive.   I am not asking the normal coaching questions such as ‘what are your goals?’ or ‘what would you like to achieve in these coaching sessions?’.   This question about desire opens up a different space, which as a psychoanalytically trained coach I enter with relish.   I coach the leader on a journey, helping them to realize the unconscious and social aspects of their desire.  How they are working to unconsciously please the ‘others’ desire, to fulfill the others lack.  For example, I coached one leader who was striving to achieve at all costs, relentlessly pursuing promotions and personal success at the expense of family and personal happiness and being quite brutal and unforgiving to others making himself unpopular with peers and losing his own self respect. In the process he was facing personal burn-out and began to question his way-of-being-in-the-world. What we discovered through our coaching work was that his driving desire for success, was not his own desire but it was to please his Fathers desire, or more accurately his fathers lack.  His Father wanted his son to achieve what he himself had desired but had failed to achieve i.e. he lacked the social recognition, power and respect he felt he deserved.   The results of this coaching work enabled the leader to slowly to undo his predicament. There is nothing wrong or pathological about this- it can be a good driver for success and pleasure but his paradox was of striving relentlessly for a desire that made both him and those around him uncomfortable and unhappy.   This coaching work helped him to reconfigure his desire and he began a process of shifting his way-of-being-in-the-world. His drive, his way of enjoying, his relationship with himself and others began to change, one small step at a time.   As he began to change, others began to recalibrate their relationships to him.   Small changes led to bigger changes and two years later this leader actually achieved a senior role he had previously thought out of his reach.   This is how psychoanalytic coaching works- the ends are not achieved via a direct and linear goal seeking path. The changes are emergent and are achieved as a by-product of a meandering and depth approach.   What had really shifted for this leader was something that was not easy to name (his relationship to the real).   He had become more humane to others and less self-orientated. His desire shifted from a blinkered focus on success to engage more with his family, colleagues and ultimately himself.   It was this relational approach to others that was previously missing, that then qualified him to become a senior leader. In this coaching work we discover something new, something potentially life-changing for the individual and for their relationship to others and to their work.  Psychoanalytic coaching takes us beyond targets and goals and works on non-tangibles that can have a huge impact on the individual. Rather than seeking to fulfil goals (desires) the coaching works to undo them, to challenge the underlying logic that drives them.    The leader who engages in this challenging work (and some don’t) begin to see patterns as to how they chase ‘false’ ego-desires and the desire of the other and they get glimpses of ‘the real’, the part of them they cannot put words to but that fuels their libidinal drive and their true desire.   As they work through these issues they are able to get back on track or find new paths and new energy as they (re)discover true aspects of their desire and of themselves. Dr Simon Western is President-Elect at the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO) CEO of Analytic-Network Coaching and adjunct Professor at University College Dublin.  Analytic network coach certification training is held regularly in Bath. The post Psychoanalytic approaches to coaching, leadership and culture appeared first on The Performance Solution.

Learn 5 ways to close the #LearningPerforming gap by reimaging how you think about fusing technology with your L&D practices.

3 must-do’s for organizations that want to identify who has the right stuff to succeed at significantly higher levels of leadership.

When we take a closer look at the nature of  Big Data as it relates to learning and in particular E-Learning, there are three standard elements used to describe it:Volume: Big Data can yield information on thousands of learners in the brick and mortar schools taking the same course or having the same instructional experiences. However, this grows exponentially when we look at E-Learning. using the world wide web, educational organizations can extend their reach on a global scale so that we are no longer looking at information from thousands but hundreds of thousands with the potential to reach millions as technology and infrastructure develops. MOOCS, such as Coursera  and Edx are just two organizations that are starting to reflect the exponentially growing access that is developing in E-Learning. With such volume, there are naturally benefits such as being able to provide a defining global perspective on education. There are also great dangers which will be addressed later. The level of scalability allows Big Data to be gathered from multiple institutions on a global level.Velocity: Big Learning Data enables learners or organizations to have rapid access to data in real time. Not only is Big Data accessed quickly but it is also agile in that it is constantly being updated at a rate determined by those who store the Big Data. This has the potential to make individualized instruction more of a reality since it drives customization based on the needs of each individual.Variety: For Big Learning Data to be effective, there needs to be a mechanism for the interconnecting and synthesis of a wide variety of information from students with different backgrounds.Credit: www.techwhirl.com Benefits of Big Data to Education     First looking at how Big Data can direct L & D in a company, we identify three different types of data:Credit: Surya P. Mohaptra The question that business organizations face in looking at their learning culture is the same one that ID's face in regards to the design of effective E-Learning in the education sector:"Given the exponential growth of technology and information, what needs to change in order to capitalize on the new Big Data reality so that we are not paralyzed by this wave of change?"In order to answer this question, we have to assert that the benefits outweigh the inherent risks and that we are willing to minimize the degree of risk through establishing effective protocols.Some of the benefits of Big Data to E-Learning would be the following:Feedback: In the past feedback to the learner was limited to quizzes and tests at the end of a learning unit with the hope that the learner would take the attending comments seriously. The simple truth in such a situation was that we were helping the learner make decisions based on limited data and usually uni-dimensional data. Now with the rise of Big Data, we can provide the learner with more comprehensive information on learning experiences which allow him or her to compare with the performance of others who have had the same learning experiences. Feedback needs to be ongoing and multi-dimensional.Collaboration: Cross disciplinary design and learning is enhanced and encouraged through the collaborative use of Big Data. Discipline silos of information need to be changed to really promote collaboration. Protecting your turf in an age of information and learning is a naive attitude that can't stand in such an age.Tracking: The value of predictive analytics lies in the ability of the user to be guided into drawing insights. Big Data can provide insights into the real learning patterns of learners in E-Learning by following their "digital bread crumbs" that they leave when they work through an E-Learning course. Thankfully, advancements in AI research will make this task much more less onerous.Next.... More Benefits and Ethical Concerns About Big Data

"Carnegie Mellon’s Robert E. Kelley … says the percentage of the knowledge you need to memorize to do your job is shrinking rapidly: 1986: 75% 1997: 15-20% 2006: 8-10% estimated Knowing how to get the answers you need is more important than storing those answers in your head, especially with the shorter lifespan of knowledge these days. What you find when you look something up is probably current. What you already know is more and more likely to be out of date. A vital meta-learning skill: how to find the answer you need, online or off." - Jay Cross (2006) Where are we in 2016? How do we find the knowledge we need? Is it in our organizational filing systems and intranets, or rather on the Web or in our professional social networks? It’s a question of complexity. If you are working with a complicated system, such as an aircraft, then the entire system is knowable, even though it would take much time and practice.  There’s a lot of stuff to know and do, but people can eventually master the system. Complicated systems and the training for them can be controlled and information organized for reference. Complex systems and learning how to work with them cannot be controlled. If you are working in a complex system, you will never be able to know everything. For instance, the environment and communities are complex systems that cannot be controlled, only influenced. There are no right answers, there are many ways of trying to achieve your goals and there are too many variables to control. This requires cooperation and collaboration between people to understand the complexity. The essence of social learning in an organization is giving up control. This may sound scary but it’s the only way to manage in a complex environment. As the world becomes more networked, interdependent, politically and environmentally challenged, all organizations are becoming more complex and are dealing with complex environments. The information-based business, which is most organizations today, needs to improve the overall flow of sense-making and intangible value creation. Social media are a means by which we can share our tacit knowledge through conversations to co-develop emergent work practices. Seeking out expertise, making sense as we work, and sharing with colleagues (PKM) is the new cycle of workplace learning. This is a business process that does not require formal training other than as an initial or supplementary input. In complexity, social learning is the primary way that knowledge is created in the workplace. Social media are the tools that can help us develop emergent practices. They enable conversations between people separated by distance or time. Enabling conversations, especially through social media, is a key enabler for organizational learning. Most other methods are just too slow and complicated.